Pete Sutcliffe has been keeping bees for over thirty years now, having started out with two home-made WBCs inherited from his father. He now works in a beekeeping team with his wife: together they keep an average of 20 colonies on various sites in the Dane Valley in Cheshire.
Following his retirement, Pete put himself through the various BBKA examinations and eventually achieved the accolade of “Master Beekeeper”. He is still rather diffident about this title, as the bees seem to be the masters a lot of the time!
Pete was a member of the BBKA Examinations Board, a BBKA Trustee and chair of the BBKA’s Education and Husbandry Committee. He is a BBKA Correspondence Course Tutor, a Basic and General Husbandry Assessor, and he has set and marked Module examinations.
Pete has also been active within Cheshire BKA: having edited the Cheshire Beekeeper magazine for several years, and been Chair of his local Branch and County Archivist. He is currently leading a county-wide working group on selective queen-rearing.
Lecture Title: “The hive as a processing centre”
“A hive of activity” as the saying goes! To ensure the colony survives in a healthy state, honey bees collect everything they need from the surrounding area in the form of relatively simple, readily available, natural products. They then process these in sophisticated ways into such diverse items as building materials, miracle foods, antiseptic paints, and store them where necessary for future use. The abilities required for these processes have evolved over millennia to a level of amazing sophistication, but how do they do it?. This lecture will describe those processes in a way that helps beekeepers understand the requirements of their colonies better.