Newsletter : October 2003
Newsletter : October 2003
1. Editorial
The first thing I have to do this month is to make an apology. Due to a misunderstanding, last month I recorded that our Chairman, Graham Roberson, did not wish to stand for office again this year. I am now pleased to be able to tell you that this is not true. Graham is happy to put his name forward again for that office alongside any other nominations that have been received. The choices will be made clear at the AGM when everyone has the opportunity to vote for next year's committee. Also, can I give you a reminder that we would like to appoint someone to be on the committee and take responsibility for the development of our programme of meetings. This could include finding out from members what they would like to hear about, identifying topics and helping our secretary contact suitable speakers. If this would interest you please make sure you put your name forward next Wednesday. 2. Next Meeting
Members are reminded that the October meeting, on Wednesday 8th from 7.00 p.m. onwards, is the Annual General Meeting of our Association. The Agenda includes the election of Officers and Committee members for the next year and offers an opportunity to influence the Association's activities as the future programme is developed. As usual, the meeting will be in the Rosa Room at Radbrook College. 3. Round & About
Oswestry Association members are reminded that their Dinner and A.G.M. is next Friday (October 10th) at The Sweeney Hotel 7-7.30 p.m. Further details from G. Jones (Tel. 01691 654448). You should also note that this is the last S.B.K.A. Newsletter to be circulated until delivery resumes next Spring. 4. Research
The imaginative thinking that lies behind research into the behaviour of bees is a never ending source of astonishment. Members interested in reading an historical recreation of bee-research might like to read "The Beekeeper's Pupil" by Sara George (pub. Review [2002] ISBN 0-7472-7041-4). For more modern examples, read on: 5. Creamed Honey
(This item is taken from 'Ted's Tips' on the Twickenham & Thames Valley website; http://www.bees.co.uk/teds-tips/page18 and http://www.apis.org.uk It seems particularly relevant for this season of our honey harvest: Ed.) 6. Honey Recipe
The following recipe is Andalucian. It is copied from the Apis-UK electronic Newsletter: (http://www.beedata.com/apis-uk/newsletters) 7. Did you know.....?
You will have noticed the unpredictability of this Newsletter in terms of when it appears! This is partly to do with my management and partly with trying to decide when it would be most helpful to have it. I am intending that this edition should be out in time to give everyone a reminder about the AGM. Subsequent editions should also then appear a few days before each monthly meeting. The disadvantage of this is that, since it will be important to send it out in advance, the postage cost will increase. Do you have any views on this?
Speaking of your views, this is the first Newsletter since I took over in January, when I have not had an original contribution from a member at hand to share with you. Of course there are lots of other sources of information to look at when deciding what to include, as I hope you will see from the rest of this edition. However, what makes the Shropshire Newsletter different from those of other Associations is what our members have to say. So, now that summer break is well behind us, why not find half an hour to tell others your views?
One of the concerns to be discussed at the BBKA Forum shortly (see opposite) is the increase in ragwort and the effect it might have on honey. The views being expressed on an Internet Newsgroup I saw recently are that: (a) the alkaloids in ragwort are poisonous if consumed in quantity; (b) if your bees are visiting it they will produce a bitter tasting honey; (c) though farmers and local authorities are supposed to clear it, many are not actually doing so, and (d) part of the spread is due to the decline of the cinnabar moth, whose caterpillar feeds exclusively on the plant. Does anyone have experience of this problem?
In addition to these business matters, our County Bee Disease Officer, Robin Hall, has been invited to talk to us about the implications for our beekeeping on the discovery of pyrethroid resistant varroa in the region. In view of the serious implications of this news it makes sense to hear the latest advice and to share the views of fellow beekeepers on the best way to combat this new threat to our hobby.
The meeting after that will be on the 12th of November when Celia Davis will be talking about 'Garden Plants for Bees'. Mrs. Davis is well known nationally, both as a speaker and as a regular contributor to 'BeeCraft' on a wide variety of topics. We are therefore guaranteed an informative and interesting presentation.
North Shropshire Association has a new Newsletter Editor to replace Mike Bain. He is Tom Nisbet, who can be contacted on 01978 363168. The next meeting of NSBKA is on 21st October (7.30 p.m.) at Redbrook Hunting Lodge. Paul Cawthorne will speak about 'GM Crops and Bees - is there a problem?'
The National Trust is organising an 'Attingham Apple' weekend on 11th/12th October. The SBKA hopes to be represented there with a beekeeping display on one of these days. Any member who could help support that should contact Brian Goodwin for further information.
By the time you receive this, the editor will have attended the BBKA Forum as Shropshire BKA's representative. This is their annual open consultation event when members are invited to air opinions and suggestions. There are no formal proposals or decisions made but the issues raised can influence the development of policies that are later placed before the annual Delegates Meeting. Issues listed for discussion include two items commented on elsewhere in this Newsletter (pyrethroid resistant varroa and ragwort), as well as the BBKA Pesticide Endorsement Policy, GMOs and Beekeeping and the legal implications of swarm collection. A summary report of the debates will be included in the November Newsletter.
(a) Honeybees tell their hivemates how much scenery they should fly past, not how far they should fly.
A bee measures how far it has travelled by how much scenery it has flown past. By jamming this navigation system, researchers have shown that bees incorporate this measurement into the dances that alert their nestmates to food. Harald Esch, of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and colleagues deceived bees into thinking they had flown a greater distance to reach a food source than they actually had. These bees then communicated their false impressions to their hivemates, who took off in search of nectar, only to overshoot the mark.
Bees measure distance using optic flow. This is the amount that an image appears to move as the position of the observer moves. Nearby things produce more optic flow than distant objects. This is why the scenery close to a moving train seems to zip by more quickly than the distant landscape, and why driving a ground-hugging vehicle such as a go-kart gives such an impression of speed. The researchers trained bees to fly down an eight-metre-long pipe to reach food. Unused to the confined conditions, the bees interpreted the high optic flow as they passed down the pipe as a sign that they were flying a long way.
Bees have no depth perception, explains Rüdiger Wehner, who works on insect vision and navigation at the University of Zurich. "Their compound eyes can only measure flow," he says. A honeybee's waggle dance relates the distance and direction of food. Analysing the distance component -- the speed at which returning bees waggled -- the researchers calculated that foragers thought they had flown 72 metres from the hive, rather than just eight.
Having witnessed the dance, recruits flew 70 metres away in the same direction. "If I looked at the tunnel dancers, I could predict where the recruits would go," says Esch. The bees' dance, then, contains information about the optic flow that a forager should experience on the way to its target, but not about the absolute distance it should travel.
(Nature Science Update May 2001)
(b) Keeping bees cool
Car manufacturers employ cutting-edge materials science and precision engineering to ensure that their vehicles don't overheat, even when zipping across the most scorching terrain or when lurching through an inner-city traffic jam. So how does the humble honeybee keep its cool while powering along at 20-30 kilometres per hour in air temperatures varying from 15 to 50 degrees Centigrade, over distances of four kilometres or more?
The secret, according Stephen Roberts and Jon F. Harrison of Arizona State University, who have been measuring honeybee respiration, perspiration and temperature during flight, is a combination of metabolism and evaporation. Bees' metabolic heat production falls by 43% as air temperature climbs from 21 ºC to 45 ºC, Roberts and Harrison report. But evaporative heat loss - the bees' version of sweating - shoots up sevenfold as temperature rises through the 30s, so that at 45 ºC insects perspire at a rate equivalent to half their body water content per hour.
These mechanisms appear to allow the bees to maintain thermal equilibrium during flights of up to six minutes long. Interestingly, different parts of these intriguing insects' bodies have different optimum temperatures. The thorax is the part that heats up, gaining around four degrees for every ten-degree increase in air temperature. The head, however, cools dramatically (through evaporation) at the highest temperatures, and the abdomen acts as a heat-exchange cooling 'tank', through a complex fluid-circulation system with the thorax.
It is not clear how honeybees manipulate these physiological thermostats with such sophistication. But,the researchers suggest, it is possible that bees, like other flying and hovering animals such as hummingbirds and bumble-bees, actively decrease their mechanical power output by changing the number and nature of their wingbeats.
The 'heat-budget' proposed by Roberts and Harrison is, they admit, only for honeybees flying in, "dry, still air and in shaded conditions". In reality, they caution, "the insects would experience large variations in airspeed, radiation and humidity." Thus to better understand how bees maintain such impressive thermal balance under natural conditions will surely require more, and more complicated, research.
(Nature Science Update August 1999)
(c) Researching the Honeybee Genome
The National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States has prioritised the next group of organisms to be considered for entry into the sequencing pipeline as the current efforts with human, mouse and rat approach completion. The organisms designated as high priority for having their genome analyzed include chicken, chimpanzee, several species of fungi, a sea urchin, a microscopic animal commonly used in laboratory studies called Tetrahymena, and the honey bee. Acquiring the sequence of various genomes is driving the development of a new field of biological research called comparative genomics.
"The best way to tease out the secrets of the human genome is to compare it with the other organisms' genomes," said Eric Lander, director of Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research. "By finding the features that evolution has carefully preserved over hundreds of millions of years, we should be able to pinpoint the signals that control gene function. This information will, in turn, translate into practical biomedical knowledge that will spur the development of better therapies in the future."
The honey bee is a very interesting organism from several points of view: 1) its powerful social instincts and unique behavioral traits make it particularly useful to neurobiologists, 2) it is important to the agricultural community as a pollinator, and 3) it is relevant to human health in several ways, including the potentially serious consequences of bee stings, and as a model for antibiotic resistance, immunity, allergic reaction, development, mental health, diseases of the X chromosome and longevity.
As the cooler Autumn nights approach, liquid honey, especially that stored outside, will begin to show the first signs of crystallisation. It will become cloudy with perhaps whorls of white crystal formation. If left to naturally crystallise, the resulting slow formation of crystals will make a hard and very granular textured honey. This will be rough on the tongue and not particularly pleasant to eat. In order to make a soft set honey, which is easy to spread and smooth on the tongue the crystal formation must be rapid. Honey which is showing the first signs of crystallisation is an ideal base for 'seeding' to form this soft set honey base. Seeding is achieved by mixing a small percentage of stock soft set honey into the liquid honey base. The percentage is not critical, I find that 10% is about right and will achieve a quick solidification.
Cream one jar of soft set seed honey by stirring with a kitchen knife until if flows and mixes with the cloudy liquid honey. The mix should be cold, do not heat as the seed may revert to clear liquid. I use a Kenwood chef with dough hook, the mixing bowl will hold ten pounds of honey, one pound of seed to nine of liquid base. Mix at the lowest speed until the seed is evenly distributed throughout the mixture and then pour into ten clean jars. The process can be repeated with another jar of seed and nine pounds of liquid base, the more you do the less percentage waste, however there is always some honey to be washed away at the end. Clean off any spillage, fit lids and place the jars in a cool place. The soft set honey should be ready in a few weeks.
Take a good sized aubergine. Slice it thin. Coat the thin slices in a light batter. Drop them into a pan of boiling oil (a light oil such as girosol or maize) for a very short time until the batter very lightly browns. Bring them out and shake off any oil and serve hot or cold. (Best hot). At this stage, these things are fairly tasteless but come alive when honey is lightly poured over them. i.e., Don't drown the aubergine in honey. The best honey by far for this dish should have a strong taste such as chestnut. This dish which is called 'berejenas a la miel' is eaten as an aperitif. I can't claim to be the best cook in the world but this one worked.
Return to Newsletters Menu