The next meeting is our AGM, which will be on the 13th October in the Shirehall, Shrewsbury, commencing at 7.30 p.m. This is the opportunity to hear reports from the officers of the Association and to vote in the new Committee for the next year.

An addition to this year’s programme will be the presentation of the "Bill Buchanan Memorial Prize". This is open to competitors at the recent Flower Show who have attended any of the Association’s theory and practical classes in the past two years. The winner is decided on the basis of most points scored in the beekeeping classes. To ensure that everyone eligible has their entries considered, would they please contact Robert Swallow as soon as possible.

After the formal business of the meeting we will again stage a ‘Brain’s Trust’ when a panel of our most expert beekeepers will answer questions raised by members from the floor. New beekeepers might find this particularly useful, though last year’s experience suggests that all of us will hear something new and to our advantage.

4.      Flower Show

From Graham Roberson, Senior Steward
On behalf of the whole Flower Show Committee I would like to thank all the people who gave so generously of their time to act as stewards at the Shrewsbury Flower Show. Without their help and enthusiasm it would have been very difficult to provide the visiting public with a ‘taste’ of beekeeping. It was most noticeable that this year in addition to the ‘old hands’ we were inundated by the beginners from Brian Goodwin’s evening classes and Roberts Swallow’s apiary classes at Radbrook. Very many thanks to you all and we hope to see you as stewards again next year.

From Robert Swallow, SBKA Chairman
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped set up the Bees Honey and Wine displays at Shrewsbury Flower Show and all those who assisted on the show days to make the Association effort such a success. I would like to particularly thank those helpers who have recently joined the SBKA and Ray and Beryl and their team who sold such a huge quantity of honey. Thanks also to members from North Shropshire Beekeepers who made such a great contribution both to the stewarding and the competitions, not forgetting their very attractive displays of beekeeping products.

5.     November Meetings

The indoor meeting will be on the 10th of the month at the Shirehall, when John Goodwin will tell us “How I Keep My Bees”. There will also be an extra outdoor meeting on November 27th to demonstrate the application of oxalic acid as a winter varroa control. All members are welcome at this meeting. Further details next month.

6.     Wood Preservers for Beehives   

Following last month’s article about Cuprinol Wood Preserver products. SBKA member Ken Tyrell contacted the makers again. He received this further clarification:

The only products suitable for beehives are:

Cuprinol Garden Wood Preserver (DP) Red Cedar
Cuprinol Trade Decorative Wood Preserver (T) Red Cedar
Cuprinol Trade Low Odour Wood Preserver Clear (T)

Any product that has "BP" at the end should not be used for beehives until further notice, since it has not been tested.

Further queries to Farrukh Ahmed, Customer Advisor, Tel: 08444 817-817

7.      The Wood and Wire Queen Excluder: Don’t Need One of Those!       Peter Edwards

At £16.85 each (remember I am using Thorne’s prices) these excluders are expensive! To a prudent beekeeper that might be reason enough to consider the alternatives, but my main dislike of them is their durability. The wire breaks away from the wood very easily and the wooden frame is easily broken if the excluder is well propolised down. If the wire warps away from the wood then it will create a gap that will allow the queen into the supers.

So what are the alternatives? Plastic is not an option in my view, as I cannot clean it with a blowtorch. The zinc short-slot excluder has served me well for many years and some that I framed myself in the 1980s are still going strong (our County Beekeeping Instructor - remember them? - Jim Crundwell, produced an excellent instruction sheet for the method), but I eventually gave up framing them through lack of time; it seemed to make no difference to the crop. It must be removed fairly carefully if propolised down or it can easily be distorted; the secret is to peel it off from just one corner. The zinc excluder can be cleaned with a blowtorch, but this does require great care.

Recently, Thorne have introduced a steel version of the short-slot excluder and this is, in my view, a real winner - very strong, easily cleaned and at £6.07 a saving of £10.78 over the wood and wire version. Now I can hear some of you saying that the round wires are smoother and do not injure the bees as they pass through it. Personally I have never seen any damage resulting from a bee going through a slotted excluder and recently read that in general bees do not move up and down through the excluder very much - bees below pass honey through it to waiting bees above. If you must have wire then Thorne have an 18” square version without the wooden frame at £9.84.

Excluders are also sometimes described as honey excluders, but that cannot be true either when we see colonies with upwards of six and sometimes as many as twelve supers of honey on them above a standard unframed slotted excluder.
[Stratford upon Avon Newsletter (Courtesy eBEES)]

8.      A Worrying Trend        Dave Cushman

It will not have escaped your notice that there has been an upsurge of interest in bees and beekeeping among the general public. Some of those 'newbies', who are starting from a very low beekeeping knowledge base, may be easily led by fringe attitudes and 'quick fix' methods such as may be readily found on the Internet. This fertile ground has been seized upon by those with axes to grind or who have their own pet theories. As a result, there is a growing swell of support for 'let alone bee keeping methods', and weird and unusual hive types (some of which are quite bizarre). In parallel with this there is a strong undercurrent of 'all chemicals, treatments and bee management are bad'. If that were not enough, no selection is applied to breeding and the bees are left to raise whatever replacement queens are required and to survive or fail according to circumstances. If any treatment or intervention is required, it often bears more resemblance to astrology or alchemy than anything that is based on science.

My concerns are for the new beekeepers and many of their beekeeping neighbours. The newbies are being led along a path that is not well founded in beekeeping knowledge. They may never be able to learn very much about bees if the methods used require the hive only to be opened a couple of times a year so that a beekeeper who lacks initial knowledge is operating hives of bees that are rarely inspected or checked for disease. Couple this with a general lack of knowledge about bee diseases and distrust of chemicals and we have a recipe for disease outbreaks. Such a situation is not good either for the newbies or their neighbours and is grossly unfair to the insects themselves.

At a slight tangent to all of this we also have some ill informed individuals infiltrating email lists and propagating badly formed logic about curing bee-keeping's ailments. This is not usually a problem but in the current climate we have many inexperienced beekeepers who, while they may not be gullible, are nevertheless unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Beekeepers of all types and degrees of experience have a duty to keep their bees healthy and reduce any risks to them, the environment and others as much as possible. I hope my fears are actually not borne out by future reality but it is a situation we should all be watching and be wary of.

Notts BKA Newsletter [Courtesy eBEES]