Last week, as a tongue in cheek homage to the political party conference season, the Radio 4 PM programme featured unusual conferences. There were experts on industrial chimneys, I seem to remember, and possibly sewers, or bridges, with delegates from many countries, and social events including a Scottish banquet with bagpiping and haggis. Today I went to a conference, the Annual Conference of the Essex Beekeepers Association, which was held in Billericay with delegates from all over Essex, and featured three lectures and a two course lunch.
I'd asked the Colchester area secretary if she knew of anybody from my side of town who would like a lift, and this resulted in my being given a lift by a newish member who turns out to live only six fields away from us. Despite the fog patches, the A12 was running like clockwork, and we made it from east of Colchester to south of Billericay in an hour, so were rather early, but the doors were already open, and the coffee flasks laid out. All three lectures were very good, and I bought some mouse guards and some contact feeders, so it was a day well spent. Given that the conference room had pretty effective air conditioning I probably had a better time of it than the Systems Administrator back at home, who found the combination of heat and humidity oppressive.
The first speaker was a German gynaecological oncologist, who in his spare time kept 30 colonies of bees, and led research into medical uses of bee products. His English was better than my knowledge of medical terms, but I gathered that there was a fair amount of convincing scientific evidence that honey could be beneficial in wound treatment and for reducing the side effects of some chemotherapy. This is good news in that honey is cheap, patients like the idea, and unless conventional medicine has made considerable strides since I worked for a firm that ran a (top ranking) healthcare fund, most conventional wound treatments aren't especially good. It seems that pollen can be useful in desensitising hay fever sufferers. Bee venom can help treat inflammatory joint problems and some types of pain. The Professor didn't want to say anything about propolis, on the grounds that it contained so many different chemicals and varied so much that nothing was scientifically proven. Something produced by bees appears to be good for treating prostate problems (chaps) and hot flushes (ladies), but having not taken notes I can't remember if that was pollen or royal jelly. The Prof did tell us a lot of facts in his hour's talk. He led into the scientific main part of his lecture via an overview of holistic apitherapy, with a list of the ailments it is said by its practitioners to treat, which seemed to be everything (except maybe housemaid's knee. It was a very long list), before explaining why those claims as couched were scientifically untestable. I heard him being given a hard time afterwards by a remorselessly smiling woman who was an advocate of homeopathy.
After that a former county bee instructor (there used to be such a thing) told us about drone assemblies. Bees mate on the wing, and drones assemble in particular areas for this purpose, where the queens find them. The question of drone assemblies is interesting, while not being something beekeepers can do anything about, unlike bee diseases, so they haven't been studied much recently in these pragmatic, cost-benefit driven times. Much of the practical research described in the lecture was done three decades ago, when there really was a bee researcher who stood on a golf course in the Isle of Man with a queen bee tethered to a fishing rod above his head so that she could be photographed in the act of mating. (I am sorry to break it to the non-beekeepers among you that after mating the drones drop dead to the ground.) The fact I found most amazing was that the location of drone assembly points seems to remain constant from year to year, over many decades. One described by Gilbert White in The Natural History of Selbourne is still in use today. The drones all die at the end of summer (the workers chuck them out) so how this continuity is mediated is a puzzle. Another puzzle is that nobody has found any drone assembly sites in Essex at all (not counting Dukes in Chelmsford) and yet our queens do get mated.
The final speaker, who had the graveyard slot when we were all full of lunch (vegetable roulade and crumble for me, pretty good. In fact I'm still full of lunch) was a Master Beekeeper and retired biology lecturer who showed us a lot of (good quality) slides of bees as he romped through feeding, crowding, swarming, superceding, diseases and all sorts of situations that bees regularly present to their keepers. I stored away some things that I didn't know, or had forgotten, while being reassured that actually I did know hunks of it.
Then the County President, wearing his presidential regalia (blue ribbon around neck with a lot of medals on it. Beekeepers' Presidential regalia is as close to being a Freemason as I'm likely to get) presented cups for the winners of the Essex honey show, and certificates to those who had passed their exams. You can't have an annual conference without some awards. And then we all went home.
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