The Bumblebee Chronicle

   

Old Bumble

I remember
The days
When you could fly
From wood to lea
Hedgerow
All the way

No fencing
No block paving
No endless acreage
Ploughed edge to edge
But room to dawdle
Among the foxgloves
And sunny honeysuckle...

Ah, by my furry knees
Times long gone
Lunch was at the Dog Rose
With warm lavender till tea
Then home
While long shadows overtook
The neat lawns
Cut too short for clover now

Home to snooze
A honeyed dream
Of summer days

With hedgerow
All the way 

Poem written by Trisha Herlihy

Photographs kindly supplied by Trisha Herlihy

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/ripplestone

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I love this stunning photograph, which captures two bumblebees, on what I think is a white Allium. The erect stalks and exuberant, white star burst flowers, drawing attention to the approaching bumblebees, in their lustrous hairy coats of black, yellow, white and burnt orange.

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Here are a couple of absolutely stunning examples of the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, taken whilst they foraged for food on some Allium sphaerocephalon in a garden.

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I could not resist sharing this fabulous picture of a Bombus terrestris (Buff-Tailed Bumblebee) with you: The strong vibrant colours of the flower and those of the striking bumblebee, gorging itself on the pollen and nector, are such a contrast.

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I absolutely adore having the opportunity and the time to rummage through a good secondhand book shop. So when Theodora kindly sent me this fabulous photo from her local bookstore in Rutland, I simply fell in love.

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Pic (1) Chris Deaves  Pics (2 & 3) Attendees of the Beekeeping course at The Apiary

Recently I stood in a garden full of hives and drank a cup of coffee whilst watching thousands of bees going about their business. It was a surprisingly tranquil experience.

The ten hives in the garden at The Apiary, home to Twickenham & Thames Valley Beekeeping Association, are all training hives, used in the practical beekeeping courses taught by the volunteer tutors there.

The world of bees is in anything but a tranquil state. Between 30 - 35% of the bee population has been lost in the last 2-3 years (Guardian), and the recent National Audit Office report confirmed what every beekeeper already knows, that the varroa mite, one of the most serious threats to bees, is now endemic:

“We would expect to lose between 5 or 10% during an average winter. The weaker colonies always die, but this is evolution in action. But over the last few years we’ve been seeing losses way above the norm, and last winter it was nearly 20% (Guardian). The point is that varroa, which everybody knows about, kills tens of thousands of colonies, and that’s where we need the research.” says Chris Deaves, honorary tutor at The Apiary and a member of the National Executive of the British Beekeeping Association (BBKA).

In November 2008, BBKA members donned their beekeeping suits and marched on parliament to deliver a 140,000 signature petition to Downing Street, asking for urgent research funding: “I feel a lot more hopeful about it now than I did a year ago. When we started with this campaign about 18 months ago we sat down about this time in 2007 and said: this is not good; we’ve got to do something; what shall we do?”

BBKA is now asking those same questions about education, and wants state funded accredited training for beekeepers. In the UK beekeeping is a mainly amateur occupation, with a network of volunteer-led associations tasked with trying to keep the craft of beekeeping alive; offering training support and advice to anyone with a hive or two in their garden or allotment.

Although it runs comprehensive beekeeping courses from junior level upwards, BBKA, as a voluntary organisation, cannot meet all the current challenges facing the beekeeping community or cater to the recent rise in interest in keeping bees.

Chris Deaves also chairs the education and husbandry sub committee at BBKA: “We are looking at the business of regenerating the state provision of real education, because the NBU (National Bee Unit) education will only be based around disease and the good husbandry aspects of that. It won’t be a complete educational framework.”

Research funding was announced in April, with Defra and various partners putting £10 million into researching pollinators under the Living With Environmental Change partnership. There is concern over how much of this will be specifically about the problems currently affecting bees. Tim Lovett, President of the BBKA, responded to the announcement by saying: “Our sincere hope is that the majority of these funds will be directed towards practical research into the problems and threats that honey bees face in this country.” 

Defra’s Healthy Bees strategy published in March, around the same time as the National Audit Office report states that the first part of its ten year plan will be to encourage beekeepers to register with Beebase, the NBU’s online database for beekeepers.

The NBU is responsible for hive inspections and disease control. There could be 20,000 beekeepers not registered. Professor Francis Ratnieks, Professor of Apiculture at Sussex University said at the time Healthy Bees was published: “Hive inspections are not relevant to the varroa problem, as all hives have it already, and without research how do we know how to control this pest?"  

Although other beekeepers seem to think it is sensible and do not feel threatened by it, Chris Deaves is not convinced that all apiarists are happy to sign up to Beebase, citing problems with data protection and gaining nothing from it as two of the main reasons: “Education is the only way. I don’t know how else you do it. You imagine if you tried to find every beehive in England, even the SAS couldn’t do it. People keep them everywhere- they’re very popular on the roofs of Paris. We had a member here once who is dead now but he was a High Court judge and kept them on the roof of the Inner Temple and did very well too.”

Before he goes off to don a bee-keeping suit and get back to the craft and the creatures he hopes will survive, he says: “Now we have to grip the education piece and take that forward and that’s a harder one. But there’s no point doing the research if the results aren’t used. There’s a long way to go but the public are on our side. Everyone likes bees. They get it, you see.”

Interview by Lucy Furlong

Twitter http://twitter.com/lucyfurleaps 

Web www.lucyfurleaps.blogspot.com or www.roarearth.blogspot.com

Pictures supplied by Chris Deaves of Twickenham & Thames Valley Beekeeping Association,

A CASE STUDY

"Creating a buzz - how one beekeeping team got started"

I'm here because I overheard a conversation recently: “The guy was saying that suburban areas and even urban areas are absolutely brilliant for bees, which is completely the opposite of what I would have thought prior to doing this course, so we sort of sat up and thought ‘hang on a minute perhaps we could do that!"

Olwen Griffith is talking about the summer taster course on beekeeping that she went to with her daughter Harriet Gardiner, and which first made them think about keeping bees themselves. Griffith, a GP, and Gardiner, a medical student, have since become keen apiarists and work as a mother and daughter team.  They were hooked after attending the winter lecture series at The Apiary, home to Twickenham and Thames Valley Beekeeping Association, near to where they live in St Margarets.

After registering with the association and attending a beginners practical beekeeping course in 2007, they bought a nucleus of certified disease-free bees last year: “It’s quite a complicated hobby, there’s quite a lot to learn, so we would rather be very cautious and proceed very slowly, and even though we have our own hive, we’re still doing the practical beekeeping course at Twickenham.”

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Photo 1

Is of a Female Bombus lapidarius (Red-Tailed Bumblebee), which I recently learned on a Bumblebee Identification course, on Salisbury Plains last Sunday, start to fade in colour towards the end of the season, as Autumn approaches.

Their stunning burnt orange tails normally look like they have been dipped in liquid copper, fade to a paler orange colour. The rest of the body on a Female is all Black. 

Photo 2

Is of a Female Bombus lucorum (White-Tailed Bumblebee), very similar to the Bombus terrestris (Buff-Tailed Bumblebee). Both have very similar yellow bands on the Thorax & Body. The B. lucorum has brighter yellow stripes, and more crucially,  the tail is pure white without a hint of ‘buff’ colour to it. Although in this photo it is almost impossible to be entirely sure there is not a slight fringe of 'buff' colour between black body and the white tail.

They both have ‘elbowed’ antennae and pollen pockets on their hind legs confirm they are not male Bumblebees.

Kindly sent in by Berni Brice

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/trumpette1

Download an excellent guide to ‘Befriending Bumblebees in your Garden’ from the ‘International Bee Research Association' (IBRA).

It is available as 1 of 4 PDF downloads here: http://www.ibra.org.uk/categories/20090402

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