The Beeholder, April 2009.

AGM February 19th Who ever heard of 40 people turning up for and AGM.? “I expect to see 7 to 10 at an AGM” said Jim Crundwell our President. Jim exaggerates terribly. I’ve been at a MBKA AGM with just 4 other people. Perhaps the large attendance was for our speaker Caroline Davies from the CAFE (Children, Agriculture, Food & Education). Caroline had admired our stand at the Welsh Food Fair and talked to us there of her interest in bringing bees into schools for teaching purposes.

“It was immediately evident to me that this would be of interest to schools.” said Caroline “ The CAFE Project has been running in Montgomeryshire since January 2005.. Funded by a CCW education grant and by the Powys County Council Schools & Inclusion Service, the project is a partnership with the Mid Wales Food and Land Trust. The trust has found it invaluable to have on its board both local primary head teachers and farmers prepared to host school visits.”

As beekeepers we were aware that a tendency to a “No Risk Culture” had made visiting schools seem out of the question. Caroline however assured us that things were not as daunting as we had assumed. First of course it was necessary to ‘talk the same language’ as teachers. We had to understand the meaning of and relevance of such terms as ‘National Curriculum’, ‘Key Stages’, the ‘Foundation Phase’, the ‘skills agenda’ and ‘pathways’ before we could appreciate where learning about bees fits in. Recently Schools have been encouraged to include Education for Sustainable Development & Global Citizenship known as ESDGC into the curriculum and this is where bees might well be able to fit in. This stimulated some useful discussion during which Caroline summarised the ‘risk assessment’ process that teachers were used to doing for any activity (“and parents could depend on them so to do when entrusting their offspring to their care…”). To a somewhat sceptical audience Caroline stated that children were not as cotton-wooled as commonly imagined. Parents did appreciate that it was important for children to visit places of work including farms and that a vital part of education was to have workers from these places visit schools to talk about their expertise. Criminal Records Bureau checking was not applicable to those going into schools or hosting visits as the children are always supervised by teachers. These outside visitors, whether they were farmers or beekeepers, would never by left alone supervising a child or children.

March 19th Just back from a lecture tour of New Zealand Wally Shaw from Anglesey came for a first visit to Newtown. His talk “Where do we go from here” was a continuation of his article in The Welsh Beekeeper. Wally’s theme was that we all have responsibility for the present state of the honey bee. We, localities , countries and communities have either directly interfered with the honey bee or allowed things to happen in our name. “We have bred bees for our own purposes –selecting for characters such as uniform behaviour, honey production, docility etc, with little regard for their climatic adaption or disease resistance.” The result was a lowering of the gene pool and an inevitability that beekeepers had to resort to medications to cure some of the problems thus created. Inbreeding of bees quickly produces profoundly dysfunctional colonies. There was a need for genetic variability within available drones (see “Honeybee sex mystery solved at last” Page 9 January BeeHolder), and for beekeepers to have a faith in Natural selection and ruthless cull colonies showing propensity for diseases. Wally was throwing his weight behind a WBKA sponsored “No Varroa treatment colony Survival Project” to be set up on Anglesey. For all our sakes we must wish the project well but the rate of natural genetic mutation would seem too low for natural selection to work in the necessary time span.