Shropshire Beekeepers' Association

 

 

Newsletter : October 2008

 

1.      Editor's Notes

As I write this, the recent ‘Indian Summer’ seems to have come to an end, with temperatures falling and bees much less in evidence in the garden. At our last outdoor meeting at the Radbrook apiary the topic was, appropriately, ‘Preparing Bees for the Winter”. Before we even began to look at the bees there was a lengthy discussion, led by Brian Goodwin, about varroa treatments. He reminded us that we should not dismiss Apistan and Bayverol as options. These are still the most effective varroicides unless one is sure that there are only resistant mites present. They also have the merit that they are not temperature-dependent, unlike those treatments that work by the evaporation of thymol. (We had heard from Doug Jones, at the previous indoor meeting, that Apiguard depends for its effectiveness on sealing the hive as completely as possible, by taping the boxes together, closing any open-mesh floors and reducing the entrance hole as much as possible).

There was debate about combining feeding with varroa treatments, both of which need to take place in the window of opportunity between removing the honey harvest and the approach of colder weather. Some members had tried putting Apiguard trays on the brood frames at the same time as having feeders above the crown board. Success was mixed. In some cases bees had failed to take the syrup as long as the Apiguard was in place, in other cases the approach had worked well. The wisdom of feeding syrup while also treating with thymol was raised. It does not always meet with approval, though for me there is a contradiction between recommending the addition of thymol to the syrup for its preservative benefit but not allowing the two to be given separately. Perhaps a member with better understanding will explain?

The afternoon finished with some practical beekeeping - and a reminder that there will be a special apiary meeting towards the end of the year to demonstrate oxalic acid treatment.

 

2.      October AGM

The October 8th meeting (7.30pm at ShireHall) is our AGM.

It is vital to the health of the Association that members come along to receive the Officers’ Reports and offer their views on current issues.

Even more, we need a continual supply of volunteers to take on the many tasks that keeping the Association in good heart requires.

As you know from the last Newsletter, the most crucial issue is to appoint a new Treasurer. It is the end of our financial year now and if a suitable nomination is not made, this may be our last meeting!

SUPPORT YOUR ASSOCIATION

VOLUNTEER FOR THE COMMITTEE


 

3.      September Meeting Report

Our indoor season was given a very entertaining start by Doug Jones, SBI for the Northern Region. He began by showing a video of beekeeping in Slovenia. Those of you who saw the article on ‘Painted Beehives in Slovenia’ that was published in Beecraft last February will have some idea of what we were shown. Doug’s commentary also told us a great deal about how beekeeping is run there, both on an individual and a state level. Would that beekeepers here had their enviable level of Government support!

Doug then raised a lot of interesting issues by questioning the received wisdom on such matters as the design of beehives, the internal layout of the brood chamber, the best way to use Apiguard, and the timing of oxalic acid treatment. He also spoke about current treatments for nosema and underlined the value of the ‘shook swarm’ technique to maintain healthy colonies

Finally he showed us some of his interesting inventions for managing those regular but problematic beekeeping tasks. These included an arrangement for supporting frames when uncapping, a fast filtering tank and an electric ‘bee-brush’ for clearing super frames in the field. Such was the level of interest that members had to be prised out of the room at the end of the evening.

 

4.      Linguist Bees  [Reported by David Cramp in Apis-UK Newsletter, July 2008]

“This piece of research has astonished me and as usual with bees it makes a mockery of the proposition that bees merely inherit a set of instructions that enable them to carry out their essential roles. It has now been determined that Asian and European honeybees can learn to understand one another’s dance languages despite having evolved different forms of communication, an international research team has shown for the first time. The various species of honeybees found worldwide separated about 30 to 50 million years ago, and subsequently developed different dance ‘languages’. The content of the messages is the same, but the precise encoding of these languages differs between species.

Now researchers from Australia, China and Germany have discovered that the two most geographically distant bee species—the European honeybee Apis mellifera and the Asian honeybee Apis cerana—can share information and cooperate to exploit new food sources.

All beekeepers know that the members of a honeybee colony routinely exchange information via dance about the location of newly discovered locations, like feeding places, water or new nesting sites. The scouts perform the so-called bee dances inside the nest. The coordinates of distant locations are encoded in the waggle phase of this ballet, with the direction and distance to the food source indicated by the orientation and duration of the dance. This duration differs across honeybee species, even if they fly the same distance in the same environment. It’s these differences which we can think of as distinct languages.

The research team is the first to successfully study the behaviour of a colony containing a mixture of two different species of bees. One of the first findings of this novel approach was that Asian and European honeybees, after some time of adjustment in the mixed colony, could share information and work together to gather food. Asian honeybees followed the dances of European forager bees, and deciphered the encoded information correctly. The dance language of honeybees is among the best studied communication systems in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, surprises are still possible, as we have shown and this work has potentially major implications for our understanding of animal communication. Next the scientists plan to study exactly to what extent variation is a factor between different bee dance languages.”

The research was carried out by an international collaborative team. In addition to the work done at ANU, the research team included Dr Shenglu Chen and Songkun Su from Zhejiang University in China and Dr Jürgen Tautz from Würzburg University in Germany.”

 

5.      Another Thymol Treatment
        (from Hertfordshire BKA: Sept. 2008 : Courtesy BEES)

For those who may have run out of the proprietary thymol treatment, here is a tried and tested recipe (sufficient for about 12 colonies) if you wish to make it yourself:

Ingredients:
100 grams thymol crystals (handle with care - avoid skin contact); 200 grams PURA or other pure vegetable fat (no additives, preservatives or emulsifiers); 700 grams Castor Sugar

Instructions:
Melt the PURA in a saucepan and allow it to cool until warm to the touch. Put the castor sugar into a plastic container and thoroughly mix in the thymol crystals until all lumps are broken down. Add the sugar/thymol mixture to the melted Pura and mix thoroughly until the mixture is the consistency of a paste. If well sealed the mixture may be stored in the bottom of a refrigerator for up to 12 months.

Usage:
On a piece of grease-proof paper about 10cm x 15cm spread the mixture so that it is about 5mm thick and place on top of the brood frames. The Crown board should allow a bee space above the paste. All ventilation should be closed except a 10cm wide entrance. Refresh the mixture very two weeks until the drop falls below 2-3 mites per week. The ambient temperature needs to be above about 15°C unless the hive is insulated. Expanded polystyrene works well (about 25mm thick) and can be left on all winter.

Note: do not apply the thymol treatment when supers are still on. It is also advisable to remove excess winter stores in the spring before the bees transfer it into the supers.

 

6.      Sip Conference Reveals Some Startling New Findings    Peter Edwards

Edited report taken from the Stratford-upon Avon Newsletter: September 2008: courtesy BEES

“The Society for Invertebrate Pathology (SIP) recently held its conference at the Arts Centre, Warwick University. There were three sessions on bees. It was quite an experience, with lectures by some very highly respected researchers, such as the team from Penn State University, led by Professor Diana Cox-Foster, Professor Ingemar Fries from Uppsala University (who discovered Nosema ceranae), and Denis Anderson from Canberra (who discovered in 2000 that the varroa mites that are causing all the problems are not V. jacobsonii, but V. destructor).

The sessions covered, amongst other things, Colony Collapse Disorder, Viruses of Bees, Transmission of Deformed Wing Virus, Viruses in general, Nosema in Bumblebees and AFB. There were several items which caught my attention immediately.

The first was that Colony Collapse Disorder appears to be triggered by Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV). This virus does not cause the collapse, but where the virus is present or has been present in previous generations, then the colony becomes much more susceptible to collapse if it is stressed. Stress may be caused by transporting colonies, poor nutrition or by other diseases. It is worth noting that IAPV is not present in the UK, as far as we know, but is present in France and Spain. This suggests to me that we should not be importing bees!

Another surprising finding was that diseases such as Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) and Nosema can be transmitted via flowers; so if a bee carrying disease visits a flower and the flower is subsequently visited by a bee from a healthy colony, then the disease can be transmitted to the healthy bee – and its colony. It is perhaps more worrying that this transmission route can also transfer diseases across species – so DWV has been transmitted to bumblebees from honeybees in this way. Presumably this is a two-way process and diseases could also be transmitted from bumblebees to honeybees via flowers. That has serious implications, because 1 million bumblebee colonies are shipped around the world each year for the pollination of crops under glass and in tunnels – Britain imports them in large numbers – and many of these bees escape into the wider environment.”

 

7.      GM Crops : Latest News.
        [These two items caught my eye recently. In the light of what seems to be a renewed campaign to allow GM crops in the UK, the issue raised by the second article below must concern us all as beekeepers. Ed.]

GM crops needed in Britain, says minister
Ministers are preparing to open the way for genetically modified crops to be grown in Britain on the grounds they could help combat the global food crisis, arguing that rocketing food prices and food shortages in the world's poorest countries mean the time is right to relax Britain's policy on use of GM crops.

Last night, the Environment minister Phil Woolas held preliminary talks with the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an umbrella group formed in 2000 to promote the role of biotechnology in agriculture. It is run by representatives from the companies Monsanto, Bayer CropSciences, BASF, Dow AgroSciences, Pioneer (DuPont), and Syngenta.

He said: "There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves. The debate is already under way. Many people concerned about poverty in the developing world and the environment are wrestling with this issue."

He stressed that the "very robust" procedures for ensuring the safety of experiments would continue, with scientists looking at each application on its merits. The move will anger environmental groups, who accuse the GM industry of trying to exploit the global crisis to win approval for their products.

[from The Independent : June 2008]

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GM Honey Banned - No Protection for Bee-Keeper
The Augsburg administrative court, Southern Germany, ruled on 30th May 2008 that honey containing pollen from MON 810 genetically modified corn is not saleable. Although the judge recognizes that the plaintiff, bee-keeper Karl-Heinz Bablok, is very adversely affected by this ruling because he is not allowed to sell such honey, it is the court’s opinion that he has no claim to protection against the growing of GM corn.

“This decision reveals that beekeeping is affected to its core by agricultural genetic engineering. It cannot be right that beekeepers and farmers must ‘carry the can’ for the deficits in the approval, for which Monsanto is responsible” says Thomas Radetzki, representative of the network supporting the beekeeper filing the lawsuit. Bablok, and the alliance of the food industry, bee-keeping associations and many individuals supporting him in his legal action, are now counting on a new verdict in the principal proceedings.

[Biofach Newsletter, Germany: reported in The Scottish Beekeeper - Sept. 08 and copied courtesy BEES]

 

Central Association of Beekeepers: The 2008 Reunion Weekend will take place from 21st - 23rd November at The Falcon Hotel, Stratford-on-Avon. Speakers include: Brian Ripley, Mathilde Briens, Norman Carreck, Michael Leith-Lucas, Julia Piggot, Jim Ryan and Ivor Davies. Cost for the Conference is £44 to members, £50 to non-members (meals and accommodation, if needed, are extra.) Further information from Pam Hunter (01403 864007) or this website.

 

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