bees at entrance
Steve McGrath
Steve McGrath
Karl has been keeping bees since 2003, combining his passion for beekeeping with his knack for hands-on craftsmanship, building his own hives from recycled wood. As a practical and skilled bee breeder, Karl draws on his background in engineering, quality, and production to approach beekeeping with precision and care.
In his spare time, Karl set up a not-for-profit social enterprise, Bees in our Community, providing businesses and individuals with a gentle introduction to beekeeping. This initiative not only helps grow the number of colonies but also encourages more people to become beekeepers.
Karl has a growing number of hives and offers his support to new beekeepers via a mentoring scheme
Paul Verrier, a beekeeper since 1982, is a retired bioinformatics research scientist who spent most of his working life at Rothamsted and while spending many years working with the Rothamsted Insect Survey, he was able to keep abreast of bee sciences and is now totally addicted to honeybees.
David Buckley’s passion for beekeeping began at boarding school, where he rescued several hives destined for a bonfire. When a local beekeeper declined them, he stored the hives secretly, determined to save the bees. He later spent three years learning from Beowulf Cooper, a founding member of BIBBA, and joined the BBKA in 1966.
Since then, David has bred his own queens following Beowulf’s principles, with some tested at over 80% Amm, showing early signs of hygienic behaviour. His work focuses on the importance of Amm and its influence on the current bee population, particularly amid ongoing concerns over imported pests such as tropilaelaps.
Roger is a practical beekeeper who has been working with bees since 1963.
At one point managing 130 colonies, Roger now oversees around 25, in addition to managing between 30–50 colonies at his local Beekeepers Association apiary, which he uses for teaching purposes.
A passionate educator and prolific lecturer, Roger focuses on the practical aspects of beekeeping, including queen rearing and bee improvement. Whether teaching, writing or speaking, Roger’s dedication to sharing knowledge has cemented his reputation as a leading figure in the beekeeping community.
An experienced journalist, Steve began beekeeping as a teenager in Yorkshire, helping to move hives to the North York Moors for the heather season. He returned to beekeeping in 2021 with a passion for treatment-free practices and raising dark Amm bees to support UK sustainability.
Now managing 30 colonies on the Kent, Sussex and Surrey borders, Steve runs a semi-commercial operation focused on breeding locally adapted bees. He also leads the Westerham Beekeepers’ bee breeding apiary, working to develop treatment-free, near-native stocks to benefit the wider community.
Steve McGrath
The lecture topic came about as a result of a question I set when I wrote the paper for BBKA Module 7 “Selection and Breeding of Honeybees”. “A group of 6 beekeepers in a local association, each with 5 to 10 colonies want to improve their local bees. Describe how they could set up a breeding program and what equipment would be needed. (They have available to them an isolated moorland site 30 miles away where the nearest known beekeeper is over 5 miles away.) Include a timescale for the planned improvement.”
The question was tackled by only a small number of candidates, and the results were disappointing. This would suggest that even at this level of beekeeping, few had a clear understanding of setting up a breeding group and collectively improving their bees. The lecture will try to show how to set up a breeding group and the timescale required in order to achieve any genuine improvements. Examples will be shown with reference to the North Wales Breeding Groups.