Today was the Annual Conference of the Essex Beekeepers Association. It was hosted this year by the Harlow Division. Harlow is a bit of a hike from our side of Colchester, but I went anyway, since the speakers sounded interesting, and I enjoyed last year's event. I allowed plenty of time to get to Harlow, which was just as well as I got lost twice, the first time through leaving the A120 before I should have, and then comprehensively in Harlow. My plan was to take the A120, drop off that to the old A120, now the B1256, and cut south through Hatfield Broad Oak when I got to Takeley. It is a good route, with the advantage if you are going to the Gibberd Garden that it delivers you to the end of their drive without having to go into Harlow at all. However, seeing an exit signposted B1256 I took it, mesmerised by George Entwhistle's truly lamentable performance at the hands of John Humphrys, and it was the wrong bit of the B1256, so I took a detour through Felsted. Which is very pretty. I got lost in Harlow, despite having studied the map very carefully before leaving, because Harlow contains approximately one thousand roundabouts and has a system of positioning road signs so that you can't read them until you've driven past. The venue was a school, which was also being used for some child-centred Saturday morning activity, but when I burst in through the doors with five minutes to spare the girl in reception pointed me in the direction of the beekeepers before I could ask. Maybe the clue was in the EBKA lapel badge and absence of child.
The talk I particularly wanted to hear was on swarming, since my attempts at swarm control this year were laughable to non-existent, and I thought I could usefully learn more about the subject (though having marked queens would be a start). The lecturer is the President of BIBBA, according to my programme. He did not use up any of his allotted time telling us what BIBBA was, but I have just looked it up and it is the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association. It was founded in 1964 by somebody called Beowulf Cooper, which is such a splendid name I think it should be celebrated more widely. He was the author of the Hymenopterist's Handbook and Drawings for the British Standard Long Lug Hive (National, Modified National or Dublin Hive) in Metric and Imperial Measurements.
The talk on swarms reminded me about techniques I knew in theory and had failed abysmally to apply in practice, gave some ideas on how I might make them work better, and drew my attention in passing to the similarities between swarm control and queen breeding, which I had never thought about before. It was a thoroughly good lecture, though my bee tutor (one of only two other Colchester members there, so far as I could see) gently ho-hummed that one of the useful tips didn't always actually work. But he agreed that it couldn't hurt. For the beekeepers among you, his tip was to move the old hive at the start of doing the artificial swarm, put the new hive on the site of the old one, and go and have a cup of tea to give the flying bees time to end up in the new hive. Assuming you are doing this on a nice day and they are flying. The old hive will then be that much emptier of bees and it will be easier to find the queen, and the remaining bees in the old hive will be young house bees, which don't sting as badly. For the non-beekeepers among you the last two sentences were complete gobbledygook. Sorry about that.
The Master Beekeeper's talk on honeybee biology was full of interesting facts, which I mostly enjoyed because I tend to like facts, though knowing that a worker bee's antenna has ten sections but a drone's has eleven is not going to make any practical difference to your beekeeping. Honeybees can see in colour, but can't detect such subtle differences in colour as humans. Apparently we can discriminate between wavelengths only one nanometre apart, whereas bees have an accuracy of around five, so we see about four hundred different colours and they see nearer seventy. They can detect tastes with their front legs, though.
The Head of the National Bee Unit tried to tell us too much. The NBU is part of Fera, and its activities span everything from pure research, to field inspections of beekeepers' apiaries around the country to monitor for disease, to work with pharmaceutical companies on veterinary medicines, to supplying information on best beekeeping practice to hobbyists. And loads of other things. Classic theory on how to structure a presentation would tell you that it is not possible to cover all of this in one conference session, and that most people's concentration starts drifting off after three quarters of an hour. I reckon you can get away with up to an hour as long as you vary the presentation method, which is why in my woodland talks I start with actual twigs and then use slides. Theory says you cannot keep an audience with you for an hour and twenty minutes of slides. I know this is true, because today I sat through them.
You are advised to decide what the key two or three points are that you want your audience to take away with them, and structure your talk around that. Signing up to the government's national database of beekeepers and apiaries is voluntary in the UK, unlike in most other developed countries that have such a thing. Registration now is running at an estimated fifty to sixty per cent, versus Fera's target of eighty plus. Anecdotal evidence (talking to other beekeepers) tells me that many people who aren't signed on are suspicious of the whole enterprise, and what 'they' are going to do with the data when they have it. So if I were given the opportunity as a representative of the National Bee Unit to talk to a room containing over a hundred beekeepers, my first aim would be to demonstrate to them the benefits that would accrue to them personally, as well as wider society, by joining the database. Today's speaker urged us to join, but the message didn't come across too clearly.
Apart from that, lunch was very nice once we had tracked down the dining room. I was in the second sitting, and after a false start down the wrong corridor we worked out the way to food by observing the path of the returning foragers from the first sitting. I bought a jar of borage honey from a professional bee farmer who was also selling mouse traps. He told me that I could feed trapped mice to owls, if I left them on the roof at dusk, and that he froze surplus mice in the summer for supplementary feeding in the winter. If I didn't have any frozen mice then a lump of pork or ham would do, once the owls were used to being fed. He didn't sound as though he was winding me up, though I never heard before that owls would eat carrion (the System's Administrator's view was that if it was cold enough they would eat anything).
All in all it was an educational day out. Next year's conference will be held in Epping, and they have already bagged Professor Nigel Dunnett as keynote speaker.
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