I spent this evening at a marathon session of the beekeepers committee, as we tried to decide whether we should or could set up a divisional apiary. Many beekeeping groups have some group bees, hives owned by the association which can be used to provide beginner beekeepers with practical experience of handling and looking after bees. We don't, because for many years we have relied on the member who does training to take beginners to his own apiary, tucked away in a secluded traditional orchard. It's a delightful spot, I got my own first experience of looking inside a colony there. But he can't carry on forever, and when the time comes that he gives up teaching, we'll be stuck. No training infrastructure, no bees for the beginners to practice upon, nothing for them at all.
It isn't a small thing, letting other people go through your bees, let alone novices. It disrupts a colony at the best of times, opening it up, and bees like to be handled gently by people who are not going to squash them by accident. I must admit I wouldn't volunteer to let my bees be used for training purposes. Group bees are the answer, plus then the club is not dependent on the goodwill and continued good health of one person. Members and their bees may come and go, the divisional apiary remains.
In theory, except that when you start to think seriously about setting up some club beehives the list of questions to be answered and problems to be solved is almost endless. Where are you going to put them? The hives need to be secure, not least from theft, but members need access to the site outside normal office hours, at least in the summer, for evening training sessions or to fit care of the bees in with everything else. You need parking for quite a few cars, if ten or twenty beginners are all going to pitch up at once, and a landowner who doesn't mind that number of people coming and going. You need somewhere to store equipment. Somebody has to run the apiary, not in the sense that they have to do all the work themselves, but someone has to understand what needs doing and line up volunteers to do it.
And what sort of hives are you going to have, and how many, and how much will they cost, and how will you pay for them? And if they come flat packed, which is the cheapest way of buying them, who is going to assemble them? Are you going to lend your beginners bee suits, at least at first until they've been up close and personal while some hives were being opened, and discovered whether they actually like it? There is all the ancillary equipment to get from somewhere. If you get a honey crop, after the bees have been messed around with for training purposes, who is going to do all the work of extracting it and where?
The question of providing classroom based theory training seemed quite straightforward in comparison, helped by the fact that we have a teacher on the committee. She'd got lesson by lesson courses worked out in outline for beginners and the next stage on, and as long as she is still involved in the association at the point where training falls back on the committee that will be fine. We'd have to find a room, with parking, but that's a technical detail. But then there are the questions of whether to charge, and how much, and whether to insist that beginners join the association and if so at what point, and how to filter out the unrealistic contingent who are never going to keep bees at an early stage in the process. We don't want to be unfriendly, or put people off, but in the swarming season you need to be able to inspect your bees every seven to ten days. If you like to go away every other weekend, or have people to stay so that you wouldn't have time to look at your bees, then it's not the hobby for you. There is heavy lifting, you will get stung, you need reasonably good close vision, you do not simply pour honey out of the hive and into a jar.
After two hours we'd narrowed things down enough to be ready to send a team for further fact finding and negotiations with one of the potential sites. We'd agreed in principle on charging and membership, and agreed to start making preliminary enquiries about grants. It was probably as much as a roomful of people could be expected to decide in one evening.
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