Colony Record Card – NatBIP 1 How to use This card is designed to be a multipurpose card that can be used for normal hive management as well as for bee improvement in one apiary, multiple apiaries, or in a bee improvement group. The data collected on each card is…
Section 3.1 – The Selection of Local Stock
Record-keeping: the selection of local stock The honey bee colonies in our area should be viewed as our resources for selection and improvement. We may only be responsible for a handful of those colonies so there is a great incentive to co-operate and work with other beekeepers in the area…
BIBBA Monthly – January 2021
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Webinars – Summary
Recordings of the majority of webinars are available on our YouTube Channel Don’t forget to sign up here, for free, to learn more about our future programme. This is a listing of the Spring 2021 programme, with links to the recording
BIBBA Monthly – December 2020
webinars for spring
Is this colony queenless? By Roger Patterson
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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Conserving black bees
Reserve signage, Oban ferry terminal CONSERVING BLACK BEES (Apis mellifera mellifera) in the Hebrides, Scotland by ANDREW ABRAHAMS, via the American Bee Journal Readers might ask, why on earth spend much of a lifetime conserving what most beekeepers perceive as an aggressive, unproductive race of honey bee — a race…
NatBIP – June 2020
Nucs
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