New webinars
Need Early Queens? Produce Your Own by Roger Patterson
Opportunity for DNA testing of your bees
Future webinars
Two further BIBBA webinar dates for your diary are 1st December and 8th December. The webinars will be presented by Adam Tofilski, a Polish Entomologist. More details will be added to the BIBBA website soon and included in the November BM.
Bee business for sale
A BIBBA member wishes to sell their bee business in its entirety as an ongoing entity. The sale would include all assets, stock and sales contracts as well as the branding associated with the company. The sale is a private sale. If anyone is interested in acquiring a relatively new, profitable…
BIBBA Monthly October 2020
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Book title
This month’s download is from 1920 and is called “The Natural History of the Bee”, written by John Anderson. As well as some lovely hand-drawn details of bee anatomy, there is another book tagged on from page 36 called “How to Handle Bees”, from the same author. You can download…
BIBBA Webinars – The National Bee Improvement Programme (NatBIP)
We are almost half way through our third round of NatBIP webinars. Thanks to Jo for opening the topic with two sessions which included a lot of good questions from the attendees at each event. Thanks also to Norman Carreck for his scientific perspective on the bees and, most recently,…
Queens: Collaboration and how to make it easy on yourself and your bees – by Karl Colyer
Last year, I did several splits including splits of all my favourite breeder colonies in mid-August. It was a slight gamble where I live in Cheshire but the weather was fair and the outlook very similar. Roger mentioned that I was out of action from last September (2 months to get walking, a year to pass a medical to get my driving licence back and lots of mobility issues in between). The rivers around me flooded while I was in hospital and many of my bees and colonies were literally swept away.
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Queens – an example of collaboration between beekeepers, by Roger Patterson
For myself and my local association, Wisborough Green BKA (WGBKA) in West Sussex, where I am Apiary Manager, I usually produce at least 100 queens per year. This is mainly to replace poorer queens in honey producing colonies, provide queens to head nucs for new beekeepers and for members who need queens for a variety of reasons. We try to encourage members to rear their own queens, but sometimes their bees need requeening with better stock. As many beekeepers only have a couple of colonies, they may not have bees that are good to propagate from. A BKA teaching apiary can be a genetic resource to distribute good local stock from.
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Welcome to the October BM Newsletter by Karl Colyer
Welcome to the October Newsletter. I try to help new beekeepers on their beekeeping journey. I have somewhat ‘adopted’ a couple of first year beekeepers who bought Buckfast nucs this year and then contacted me for help. One had two colonies on commercial frames. Both colonies swarmed in June. The…
Sept 2020 – book download
Book download This month’s download is from 1907 and is called “Facts about bees”, written by E. Root. It’s fascinating to know just how much information was around a hundred years ago despite no internet and email!