At this year's County Honey Show, Rugby Beekeepers were presented with the 'gift' honey from the show together with £80 that was the result of competitors 'buying back' their own honey.

At our last committee meeting it was decided that both the honey and the money should be donated to Myton Hospice.

In the last week APHA (The Animal and Plant Health Agency) has issued a warning that it is finding many colonies are extremely low on stores. It is recommended that you check your hives regularly, especially if you have just extracted honey, to make sure your colonies do not succumb to starvation.

For advice on feeding and making up syrup solutions please read this document from the National Bee Unit (NBU)

In addition to starvation, many colonies are being attacked by wasps that seem to be around in large numbers at the minute. We have heard from several members who have lost colonies to wasps over the last few weeks. For more information on how to prevent wasp related losses please read this document from the NBU.

One of our swarm collectors reported yesterday that they'd received a call to ask if they could collect a swarm. This is the first one that Rugby Beekeepers has been asked to collect this year. Very early compared with last year when the first swarms weren't appearing until mid-may.

It was a dreary damp day and the wind was starting to get fairly brisk when we turned up to to carry out our annual apiary cleanup session



This year we had three colonies over wintering, all doing well, but as we have enough hives for eight and the spares were in need of a good scrape and torching we set about the job



A small team of scrapers were employed and as the weather was fairly inclement and the temperature around 7C the wax and propolis were easily removed. It wasn't long before a small pile of scraped boxes, queen excluders, crown boards, etc. were piling up ready to be torched.

One of our volunteers had brought along an industrial sized gas bottle and blow lamp to seriously take on the job of torching the hive parts



Despite the low temperatures, disturbing the colonies upset them a bit and some of our valiant volunteers decides to go into fully suited mode to stop the guard bees doing their job!



Many thanks to all of you who turned up to help, as we had plenty of help we just managed to finish, tidy up and leave as the first drop of rain started to fall.

Same time, same place next year

Welcome to our revamped website. Our previous web master, Rowan, to whom we owe a massive thank-you for his hard work, moved away from the area and we temporarily moved this website to a new hosting platform. The new site was quite basic and so, over the last few weeks, some time and effort has been put in to make the site you see today.

The site has been designed with mobile phone and tablet access in mind, so we have made sure it works well on these devices. It still works fine on a PC or laptop though.

Over time it will evolve with more information added and existing information updated. If you notice any mistakes or broken links please let us know through our contact page.