Hon. Newsletter Editor:
Peter Edwards
E-mail: beekeepers@stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk

A warm (if slightly belated) welcome to Anne and John Beaumont from Beausale who joined us in December.

The Association still has a small quantity of bulk honey available at £1.50 per lb - first come, first served.
Contact Will Spencer.

A member has reported finding the odd small shard of glass in a box of honey jars. I have checked with the manufacturers and they advise me that, although the jars should be perfect when despatched, it is always possible that jars could get damaged in transit. Clearly, it is our responsibility as honey packers to ensure that jars are clean and free from any unwanted debris.
Peter Edwards

I have delayed publishing this recipe to give you all time to recover from the excesses of Christmas!

Butter and base-line an 18cm/7" round deep cake tin.
Combine the flour and cinnamon in a bowl. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar and dried apricots.
Mix the honey and milk together and add to the dry ingredients with the eggs. Mix well together and spoon into the prepared tin.
Bake in the oven at 170ºC/325ºF/Gas Mark 3 for about 1hr 20mins until firm to the touch. Cool slightly and turn out on to a wire rack.
While still warm, brush the top of the cake with runny honey; glaze again while cooling.

We took a holiday in Tunisia during October and wondered whether we might see some beekeeping there. The holiday was booked last minute and I had very little time to do much research - an Internet search failed to find any beekeeping associations and a posting on the newsgroups brought no response. Whilst there, we decided to do the two day safari to the Sahara and the 750 mile round trip gave us the opportunity to see plenty of the countryside. Mile after mile of olive groves with bare earth between the trees soon dashed my hopes of seeing many hives (they have 60 million olive trees and the harvest takes 6 months - with the army helping!). Our guide confirmed that most of the hives would be in the rather greener north of Tunisia and, of course, we were heading south. However, many of the main highways have eucalyptus trees planted by the roadside to provide shade - although, ironically, many are now being cut down to save water - and he suggested that we might see hives just outside the city of Gafsa, where migratory beekeepers move to work the large stands of eucalyptus. Once again we were unlucky, as the flow was over and we only found one beekeeper, a tent and six empty hives.

On the return journey, our guide told us that there was a commercial beekeeper based in the town of Nabeul, not far from our hotel, so at breakfast next day, we asked our waiter if he knew the place and could suggest the best way to get there. This time we were in luck, as the waiter lived in Nabeul, passed the shop every day and would be happy to give us a lift on his way home after he had finished the breakfast shift!

It was fortunate that we had our waiter friend with us, as the lady looking after the shop spoke only Tunisian Arabic - not my strongest language! Apparently the bees were 250 km away with 'the Boss' - we did not find out whether he was her husband or not - but she did show us three, very under-populated, Langstroth hives at the back of the building. The few bees were very black and ignored us completely.

On our return I had a reply to my posting on the newsgroup from Mike Griggs at Cornell University which is, of course, renowned for beekeeping. He had worked in Tunisia with the Peace Corps and was able to tell me a great deal about beekeeping there. As I suspected, much of the beekeeping is in the north and beekeepers there import modern (Langstroth) equipment from Italy. In the more remote regions, e.g. the mountains, there are fewer beekeepers, but they usually still work with the traditional hives called 'djebbahs'.

It would clearly pay to do more research before going - particularly if visiting the northern areas.
Peter Edwards

BETHESDA Md. Wednesday January 7, 2004

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced that the first draft version of the honey bee genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases.

The sequence of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was assembled by a team led by Richard Gibbs Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Sequencing Centre at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The honey bee genome is about one-tenth the size of the human genome, containing about 300 million DNA base pairs.

Researchers have deposited the initial assembly, which is based on six-fold sequence coverage of the honey bee genome, into the NIH-run, public database, GenBank (www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank). In turn, Genbank will distribute the sequence data to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database, EMBL-Bank (www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html), and the DNA Data Bank of Japan, DDBJ (www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp).

Sequencing of the honey bee genome began in early 2003. NHGRI provided about $6.9 million in funding for the project and the U.S. Department of Agriculture contributed $750,000.

The honey bee is valued by farmers for its ability to produce honey and pollinate crops. Besides its importance in agriculture, the honeybee serves as a model organism for studying human health issues including immunity, allergic reaction, antibiotic resistance, development, mental health, longevity and diseases of the X chromosome. Biologists also are interested in the honeybee's social instincts and behavioural traits.