Karl has been keeping bees since 2003. He enjoys building his own hives from recycled wood where he can and is a very practical and hands-on bee breeder, bringing his engineering, quality and production experience to the fore.
Karl has set up a not-for-profit social enterprise (www.beesinourcommunity.org.uk) which places hand-made hives and home-bred locally adapted bees onto company properties, onto farmland as well as into individual’s back gardens. This creates a growing curiosity for bees and catalyses people to want to support them and (hopefully) keep their own. He mentors a number of new beekeepers and has a growing number of hives in Cheshire and beyond.

Presentation: "Beekeeping on a Budget"
Like any hobby or other addiction, beekeeping can be done on a low budget and kept under control or it can pretty much take over your life and your disposable income. Sometimes, keeping it simple and flexible allows the maximum enjoyment to be obtained for minimum cost. Karl will talk through how his thinking and approaches to beekeeping changed over the last 20 years having built and set up over 300 hives in this time for his own use and for others.

Lynfa Davies has been keeping bees for nearly 20 years with her husband Rob near Aberystwyth in mid Wales. She keeps approximately 25 colonies for honey production and enjoys raising her own queens.  Lynfa is passionate about education and regularly gets involved with teaching beekeepers, giving talks, and running workshops. She is an active member of Aberystwyth Beekeeper’s Association and sits on the Learning and Development Committee of the Welsh Beekeeper’s Association. It was this passion for education that inspired her to take the BBKA modules and she was awarded her Master Beekeeper certificate in 2016. Following this she went on to study for the National Diploma in Beekeeping (NDB) which she achieved in 2019. Lynfa has recently developed the Healthy Bees Academy, funded through the Healthy Bees Plan, and she also works as the Biodiversity Officer on the Farming Connect programme in Wales.

Presentation:  "Why we should encourage drones and how we can do it"

Drones are an essential element in a healthy, functioning colony but they often get bad press and are labelled as lazy and a drain on resources. In this talk, I want to convince you that they are not only essential but also very useful! The most important function of the drones is to mate with virgin queens but in addition to this they are also a useful indicator of the health and stage of development of the colony. Drones are an integral part of Varroa control using Integrated Pest Management approaches and therefore there are times when we want to encourage drone production in our colonies. This talk will look at some of the techniques for encouraging drone production and when you might do this for greatest effect.

Presentation:  "Queen rearing with just a couple of hives"

Organised queen rearing requires enough colonies to make your selection from as well as additional colonies to rear the queens and contribute to the mating nucs. For those with only a couple of hives this is difficult, but it is possible to develop and increase stock using these limited resources. In this talk we will look at ways of making increase and being in control of the queens you raise even when you only have a couple of hives. These essential skills can help us reduce our reliance on buying queens, which is both expensive and unsustainable. Queen rearing is labelled as being complicated, but it doesn’t have to be and by starting out with simple techniques you will develop your skills, and who knows, you may want to progress on to more complex techniques.

 

David Parker has been keeping bees for nearly 10 years and currently runs around 20 hives along with practicing small scale queen rearing across three apiaries.  He is a committee member of Weybridge Beekeepers (a division of Surrey BKA) where he is the webmaster. He has been acting as project manager for the setting up of their new teaching apiary and has developed a WordPress plugin for other BBKA divisions to use.

Work wise he sits as a non-executive director on a number of companies, is a board observer on one he co-founded and an advisor of several others along with running his own payments consulting business (Polymath Consulting).  His beekeeping (Polymath Bees) is run as an operating division of one of his other companies – Polymath Properties.

Presentation:  "Beekeeping with a full-time job"

You work five days a week and the sun shines, come the weekend and you need to do your bees - it is raining.  Then you get told by some lovely older retired person who is a beekeeper that you need to inspect your bees every 7 days and they cannot understand what the problem is.  Of course, on the weekends when it is nice and sunny the kids need to go to the rugby end of season festival, so even that day does not work out.
Keeping bees whilst also doing a full-time job is always a challenge, but what can we do to help ourselves?  I will talk through how I keep my bees, what I do, why I do it and how I hope it allows me to manage the hives I do whilst definitely working full time.  There is no single magic answer, and unfortunately due to anaphylactic attacks in the past I cannot even keep them in my back garden so do need to travel to out apiaries.
The talk will cover areas including: time management, preparation, my beekeeping practices and finally queen rearing.

Roger Patterson is a practical beekeeper who started beekeeping in West Sussex in 1963. He is heavily involved in the craft, being a demonstrator at his local BKA since the early 1970s and manager of their teaching apiary. He had a full term as BBKA Trustee, is currently Vice President of Bee Diseases Insurance Ltd (BDI) and BIBBA President. He has vast experience with a fairly large number of colonies, both his own and others.
With a full-time job, he ran 130 of his own for about 15 years.
In addition to hosting many videos, Roger is a prolific writer and speaker, where he passes on the knowledge gained from experience and observing bees, in the hope it helps beekeepers to keep their bees in an understanding and caring way.
He owns and manages Dave Cushman's website www.dave-cushman.net, that is accepted as one of the world's most comprehensive beekeeping websites.

Presentation: "BIBBA: Supporting Small-Scale Commercial Beekeepers"
What do we mean by semi-commercial? Well, there is a regular stream of beekeepers who increase their colony numbers, whether by accident or design. They end up with surplus honey, wax and other products, so sell through one or more outlets. They are thus semi-commercial, even though they may only be reducing the cost of their hobby or augmenting their income. As the number of colonies grows, unforeseen problems often arise, especially for enthusiastic, but inexperienced beekeepers. A different approach with more efficient and suitable management techniques may need to be adopted. Methods that suit a small number of colonies may by inappropriate for larger numbers, as it isn’t always the best option to do the same things to more colonies.
Often, this important sector of beekeepers, with perhaps less than 40 hives, isn’t well served, as they are too large for many local BKAs and too small for the professional body. BIBBA have recognised this and have introduced a group aimed at “Commercial and Semi-Commercial Apiarists” (CaSCA). There are many BIBBA members in this position, so there is a wealth of experience that can be shared on a national basis. This presentation will highlight some of the issues and give some suggestions of how BIBBA can help beekeepers who sell products, or intend to, to run a viable beekeeping operation and hopefully reduce some of the many failures.

Current Chair & Education Officer at Westerham Beekeepers, a club in the Kent / Surrey borders.  A group of like-minded beekeepers started a project in 2017 to select for varroa resistant traits identified from research on long-term resistant colonies and from their own data.  A member of the “Path to varroa resistance in the UK” team, led by Professor Stephen Martin, that published the educational website in April 2023:  www.varroaresistant.uk

Presentation:  "Identifying varroa resistant traits"

The presentation will link the traits of resistant honey bees to practical beekeeping.  Including the monitoring techniques to find these traits, the biology of why varroa is being controlled by the bees and the importance, for bee improvement, of breeding from “Varroa Resistant” colonies.  The experience and research from Westerham Beekeepers will be shared, together with insights from leading scientific research and case studies of other beekeepers with a long-term track record of managing varroa resistant colonies.

 

I live in the Tamar Valley that forms the border for much of Devon and Cornwall. After more than 20 years of beekeeping I am still gripped with excitement at the start of the season. I keep darkish mongrel bees and breed my own queens. I am currently part of small group trying to breed queens that can tolerate varroa and do not need treatment. It is a journey.
Bees and beekeeping have given me a huge amount. I am interested in wildlife and conservation. As a beekeeper I am conscious that we have a responsibility not only to care for honeybees, but all bees. I believe that beekeepers are well placed to advocate for all pollinating insects. Teaching beekeeping has also enabled me to share these passions.

Presentation: "Lessons from the Bee Shed"
This talk is a journey through a few of the beekeeping lessons I wish I had learnt years ago. It is aimed at the beekeeper, like me, who makes mistakes, but who is striving to be a better beekeeper. There is no shortage of advice on how to be a beekeeper: from You Tube via Facebook to Zoom Lectures. But it is not always easy to weigh up this sometimes conflicting advice. I will try and give you some pointers.
There are a few important principles in beekeeping. I want to look at some of these and how we can recognize them and apply them. I will share with you my thoughts on such topics as:
*Use of the smoker and protective equipment
*Swarm control
*Aggressive bees
*Drawing foundation
*Record keeping
I hope that this talk will enhance your respect for this wonderful insect and given you a few ideas as to how to become a less bad beekeeper.

Jo has been beekeeping since the 80s and has been a member of BIBBA since that time. He has been a bee inspector, a commercial beekeeper and a past President of BIBBA. Author of the book, “The Principles of Bee Improvement”, he has tried to show that we can all contribute to better bees in our area, or indeed the opposite, add to the problem, by taking the wrong actions.

Presentation:  "Native, near-native, locally adapted or imported?"

Our local bee populations are largely the result of actions by beekeepers over many years, particularly the addition of bees of various sub-species. The net result for most of us is randomly hybridized bees of very variable quality. Is there a sustainable way forward, towards a better-quality bee? How can we all contribute to a more positive approach and not merely continue with failed methods that merely produce ‘more of the same’.