BIBBA: Supporting Practical Beekeeping

Kevin was born and bred in Carmarthenshire. He started keeping bees when he was around 15 years of age and he now keeps some 20 stocks of native Bees.  He is very keen to improve his stocks and he works with a small breeding group near Lampeter, Ceredigion to that end.

He gives talks on keeping bees and related matters.

He practices as a Solicitor in partnership with his daughter in the Teifi valley now on a part time basis specialising in country matters. He lives with his wife Edith on a conservation farm near Llandysul where he enjoys country life including , shooting, fishing, gardening and of course Bee keeping.  He enjoys researching his family history and is currently learning Spanish at the local university.  He is looking forward to passing on his knowledge about bee keeping especially to his five grandchildren.

Presentation:  "History and Traditions of Bee Keeping in Wales"

No matter where it is in the world the history of beekeeping can be fascinating, often being part of culture that has existed for centuries and included in early laws. Beekeeping in Wales is known to go back for well over 1000 years, being mentioned in Hywel Dda laws. It is also known that bees had great value in mediaeval Wales. This lecture will reveal some of the history and traditions of Welsh beekeeping from the beginning until modern times.

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.

On behalf of Weybridge BKA. "Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV). One BKAs experience"

Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus has recently affected the WBKA teaching apiary and an increasing number of our members’ bees. This viral infection can cause the rapid death of large numbers of bees and sometimes complete loss of colonies. It is on the increase nationwide, which is concerning many beekeepers. Although there is research work being done, there is relatively little published information available. The presentation will discuss the disease based on what amateur beekeepers have seen and what we have done, with a little scientific information. It is not a scientific presentation. Amongst the point discussed are: -

• What is CBPV?
• How can it be recognised and what are the symptoms? (videos and photos)
• How do bees become infected and how is the disease spread?
• What can the beekeeper do?
• Is it necessary to report an outbreak?
• Current research into the disease and WBKA participation.

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’.

I am a retired university lecturer in Human Genetics, former Conservation Officer of BIBBA and former President of SICAMM, with a postgraduate Diploma in Animal Genetics and a practical PhD. I have kept bees for over 40 years and now maintain some 40 hives of Dark Bees here in Northumberland. I opted to learn beekeeping from other beekeepers and the bees themselves, rather than books, which I see as perpetuating management practices more appropriate to Mediterranean bees in the South than the native subspecies in the North.

I am horrified by foreign reports of non-treatment overwinter survival rates at only 3%, when mine are closer to 90 and my main preoccupation is the re-creation and preservation of native, varroa-free A. m. mellifera. I am currently establishing a Dark Bee Reserve here. This latitude and altitude demand revision of management practices and I am conscious of a widespread lack of understanding of major genetic principles vital for the long-term survival of native honey bees, both as a genetic resource and as a worthy companion in its own right.

Presentation:  "Genetic priorities for honey bee conservation and their application in a new Dark Bee reserve"

Nature manages life by eliminating weaklings, as should you. First therefore, allow natural selective forces to do their work. Second, identify those stocks that both thrive and show the external features of the race you are trying to conserve. Wing morphometry comes next, for native A. m. mellifera a mean negative Discoidal Shift and a mean Cubital Index below 2.1 are essential. Fourth, confirm their native status by DNA analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Mating must be among a substantial population of similar bees, while not allowing inbreeding and consequent homozygosity of harmful recessives, but preserving polygenic combinations that specify quantitative traits and complex behaviour patterns. It is vital to maintain a very high degree of polymorphism of the Complementary Sex Determiner gene, Csd.

Maintain variety, preserve queen lines, eschew uniformity and especially do not propagate multiple daughter queens from single breeders. Aim to mate your virgins with drones of other queen lines. Collect wild native swarms within 50 miles, but spurn all queens of other races. Propagate drones from all good queens of your chosen race.

Work with natural selection, not against it. Keep local and keep close to nature.

Colm has been beekeeping for over 50 years, he and his three brothers worked 30 colonies with their father until Colm took over the beekeeping operation in his early 20s. With his wife Imelda he manages 60 honey production colonies, and another 30 colonies and nuclei for the production of Amm queens and nuclei for sale. They use only Amm bees for local adaption, ease of management and rapid Spring build-up. Both have full-time jobs, working the bees the weekends and queen rearing tasks as needed on weekday evenings. He is education officer for his local association, a committee member for the Native Irish Honey Bee Society (NIHBS) and holds beekeeping, bee improvement and queen rearing classes at his home and association apiaries during the summer. Along with Jonathan Getty, he has been giving online training to the more than 200 members of the NIHBS Queen Rearing Group Scheme since 2021

Presentation:  "Colony assessment: How to identify top performers"

Beekeepers take the time to do routine inspections on their colonies, to check for signs of swarming, space needs for brood and nectar, signs of disease etc., but many don’t take a critical look at the performance of their colonies during these inspections, with a view to improving overall performance of their colonies.

Identifying the traits, and performance, you want from your bees, and scoring your colonies against these will identify which colonies outperform their neighbours. Choosing to only produce queens and drones from the best performers will lead to a measurable improvement in production and in your enjoyment in your beekeeping.

We assess our colonies on docility, brood pattern, comb building, steadiness during inspections, honey production, tolerance of disease, spring buildup, and other criteria. Over the last 25 years colony performance has improved with every new generation of queens produced. We get higher honey yields, faster spring buildup, our bees are easier to handle, and our routine inspections are down to a few minutes per colony.

In my talk I will go through what we record, how we record it and how we do the overall assessment at the end of the season to identify our top performers.

Kevin is a beefarmer running 100 colonies plus nucs in and around Sudbury in Suffolk. Kevin breeds his own locally adapted bees using drone flooding. Kevin and his wife Julie wholesale honey across East Anglia and beeswax cosmetics to beekeepers across the UK.

Kevin also runs the Abberton native bee group at Abberton reservoir in Essex working to reintroduce the native British honey bee to the area.

Presentation:  "Producing locally adapted queens is more fun than buying them"

• Why locally adapted queens? Any creature that is adapted to its environment should be better than those brought in from elsewhere.
• Assessing your queens and colonies to propagate from: This is easy and is probably being done already, but are you recording it and using the data?
• Beekeeper selection and natural selection: Are they the same thing or different?
• The importance of culling queens: Nature will always replace the poor doers, so will good beekeepers.
• The importance of drones: Some hints and tips on influencing them locally.
• Introducing queens: This is a skill that all beekeepers need.
• Working together informally or as part of BKA: BKAs are well placed for encouraging beekeepers to use the best bees for their area.
• Working together to produce locally adapted queens – how we did it at Abberton: An example of an established group.

My Interest in beekeeping started around the turn of the century through an old bee farmer friend of the family. Around that same time I moved to New Zealand and then on to the USA, finally returning to the UK in 2014 specifically to become a bee inspector. My experiences are varied but my focus has always been leaning towards the commercial side of beekeeping. I completed 10 seasons with the National Bee Unit where I covered several Inspection areas around the UK and up until recently the role of Regional Bee Inspector, managing a team of inspectors across the southeast. I’m currently on secondment at another APHA department with the National Wildlife Management Centre. I currently run circa 50 colonies with capacity for 100, if necessary. I tend to concentrate on honey production and queen rearing/breeding. And more recently I have been involved in several research projects, an area of work I hope to pursue more of in the future.

Presentation:  "The Tropilaeplaps mite - Varroa’s exotic house mate!"

An overview of the exotic mite Tropilaelaps, it’s behaviours and morphometry, what it is and how much of a threat is it to UK beekeeping. The talk largely focuses on the findings of a recent stakeholder sponsored research trip to Thailand to find out how the UK can be best prepared in low level detection of the mites should an incursion take place. Would you know what to look for?  Also looking at distribution and possible routes of entry in the country. Including anecdotal, observational findings from the trip

Ceri has been keeping bees for 30 years. He runs Cardigan Bay Honey, a honey farm based in the lower Teifi valley. Since the beginning we have used the bees local to our area and have been breeding local bees as a central tenet of our operation, which at times feels more like a conservation project than a bone fide profit making business!

In 1999 Ceri went to work on a bee farm in New Zealand to further his knowledge, leaving his mum, Carol Morgan, in charge of the 100 plus colonies of native bees we already managed.

Between 2009 and 2014 Ceri worked as a seasonal bee inspector in the Pembrokeshire area. Since 2014 Ceri has made his living solely from his bees.

Today the business manages over 300 colonies spread over two dozen apiaries and employs Ceri and his son Cai full time, with other children contributing where necessary and where time allows.

Presentation:  "Making a living from Locally Adapted Bees"

The talk will encompass the trials and tribulations of making a living from managing native bees, with emphasis on bee management and practical aspects of equipment and hive ware.

I shall also discuss our stock selection and the methods of queen rearing we've found best to suit our needs here in West Wales, I'll also talk a little about our seasonal patterns.

Peter Jenkins has kept bees since the age of 14, a period of nearly 60 years. He now keeps around 80 colonies of near native bees in Cardiganshire. This is a marginal area for honey bees, where only locally adapted bees will survive without a lot of intervention from the beekeeper. Spending most of his working life as a Chartered Engineer, working around the world on marine and naval projects, has meant that, for many years, he had little time for regular hive inspections, as advised in text books. Nevertheless, he has harvested at least average crops of honey year on year using bees improved over a lifetime by his father, a process he is now continuing, following his father’s death in 2009.

Presentation:  "The KISS approach to beekeeping"

Many problems in beekeeping are caused by beekeepers reading books and listening to other people who read books, then rigidly following what they are told without understanding what the bees are trying to do. When things go wrong, as they often do in beekeeping, they blame the bees for not reading the book! With a little knowledge and experience, the more astute beekeeper will soon realise that much of what they have been taught in their early days of beekeeping as "absolute fact" may not always be so.

"The KISS Approach" has been developed over many years of finding practical solutions on the hoof to some of the many beekeeping problems that all beekeepers face, often unexpectedly when the hive is opened. Following the books often gets you into trouble, but they aren't very good at getting you out of it. Things that can work or get you out of trouble are rarely covered in standard books, so you must work solutions out for yourself, but you need basic knowledge and experience to do it. In short, this presentation is about how to achieve maximum output for minimum input.