Dear Member,

The bad news of this month is the discovery of EFB in a local Rugby hive. This raises anxiety for all of us and means we need to be careful - isolating swarms and not moving bees or equipment between apiaries until we have been given the all clear from the bee inspector. Please ensure that your bees are registered on BeeBase so that your apiaries are on the bee inspector's radar.

Just before we were alerted to the presence of EFB in Rugby, Cathy kindly agreed to remove a colony of bees from a hive near the town centre that had been left neglected for several years and was in bad shape. Pauline and I assisted her in this sticky, laborious operation taking several hours. She has now successfully re-hived these bees.

I was extremely annoyed that these bees had been left unattended by someone who had been a member of our association and therefore should have known better. When I remonstrated with him that he had been irresponsible in leaving the bees to their own devices, he informed me that “bees have survived without attention for thousands of years”. While this may be true, not managing the bees you have responsibility for in an urban area means that those bees can cause a nuisance to neighbours and bring bees and beekeepers into disrepute. Also because of the introduction of foreign pests and diseases, unmanaged bees are less likely to survive, and EFB can be spread by drifting bees.

While it is always possible that for many personal reasons beekeepers may have to give up beekeeping, If you find yourself in this position, please, please, don’t just abandon your bees, ask for help to get them re-hived in someone else’s apiary and make sure your equipment is either sold or disposed of somewhere where it will not attract feral bees.

Swarms this year have been few and far between, which is sad news for those new beekeepers waiting for a swarm and those members who have lost their bees over winter and are waiting for a swarm to replenish their stock. Of course the EFB scare will also limit what we can do to pass on bees, particularly to those outside Rugby.

Please note the change of times for Apiary sessions. I am trying to accommodate a new beekeeper who works on Saturdays, so the meetings will now start at 3.30pm. Also because we are planning a ‘Bring and Share’ lunch on the same day as the Apiary meeting in August, that day we will have the Apiary meeting in the morning and the social gathering in the afternoon.

Regards,

Margaret Holdsworth