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

It has to be said that the August meeting did not achieve all of its objectives! However, we did find and mark three queens (we blamed bad light for not being able to find the remainder), replaced some poor brood comb and hacked back some of the encroaching vegetation.

This was our first opportunity to have a look at our new queen (see last month's newsletter). It was noted that she was perhaps a little smaller than we might have liked and we also had to re-mark her as the yellow spot had already worn off (I found this with the other queens that I had from this breeder), but she had laid up six frames of brood and so we will reserve judgement on her until the Spring.

I saw a report on Teletext on 9 August that the University of Illinois has published research that shows that eating honey helps prevent heart disease. Apparently it provides more antioxidant activity than the currently fashionable '5 portions of fruit or vegetables a day', but there was no indication of the amount of honey it is necessary to eat! Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any further details on their website, but I would suggest that it would do us no harm to give this some publicity.

I think that we will continue to stuff ourselves full of fruit & veg and eat honey too!

Although few members responded to the request for help with our stand at the Lions' Country Fair at Wellesbourne Water Mill, those of us who did attend had a very good day. On a perfect morning, Mike and Moira Osborne and I set out the stand with display boards, leaflets, hives, skeps, veils, smoker, comb, jars of honey for sale (with free tasting) and an observation hive with two frames of bees.

We had a steady stream of 'customers' all day, with the free honey tasting and the observation hive attracting much interest, especially from the children. Although I cannot honestly say that we have recruited any new members, I think that we did a good job of promoting local honey. There was also time for those on our stall to have a good look around the multitude of other fascinating exhibits - e.g. coracles, fly-fishing, fish smoking, a working cooper as well as the mill itself. Unfortunately the bakery, with its wood-fired oven, had sold out of bread just before Sue and I managed to get there!

I am pleased to be able to report that we made a donation of £17 to the local charities from the profit on honey sales.

Those of you who were at the Water Mill event may remember some unusual bright purplish-blue pollen in the observation hive. The frames were taken from a nuc in an apiary between Wellesbourne and Barford and a quick look in Dorothy Hodges 'Pollen Loads of the Honeybee' led me to think that it might be from Campanula (perhaps in the farmhouse garden). Although I intended to have a look at the pollen under the microscope, I never seemed to find the time. However, whilst checking varroa floors at Hunscote, I found some loads of the same pollen and brought it home for a closer look. Under artificial light it was a perfect match for the colour Hodges gives for Campanula, but a hastily prepared microscope slide (more haste less speed, as my grandfather used to say!) showed pollen grains that appeared to match Sainfoin - a completely different shape and colour from Campanula. The only other blue pollen given by Hodges for that time of the year is Phacelia, but the colour did not appear to be quite as good a match and the shape of the pollen grains is again completely different.

I was puzzled and put postings on the Internet news groups to see if there were any experts out there who could suggest what plant it might be. My postings produced a number of replies, including one from a beekeeper in Wales with a master's degree in Palynology offering to examine the pollen.

Murray McGregor, a well-known beekeeper in Scotland, was sure that it was Phacelia so I had another look at a pollen load, this time in daylight. The colour now appeared quite different, changing from the dull purplish-blue that I had seen under artificial light to a much more vibrant metallic navy - the colour for Phacelia. I made another slide - carefully - and was then able to confirm that the shape of the grains matched those shown for Phacelia. The pollen grains in a bee's corbicular load are always shrivelled and will bear no resemblance to their true shape unless properly prepared; in my haste I had not allowed sufficient time and was therefore looking at the grains in their shrivelled state. I have since found out that, as suspected, the Phacelia was grown as a fertiliser crop at HRI, Wellesbourne, but I regret that I am unable to report on the flavour of the honey as these apiaries were both used to produce nucs for increase and have given very little main-crop honey!

Murray also gave me some interesting information on Phacelia, which I am reproducing with his permission:

"Widely grown in parts of Europe as a cover crop on set-aside ground, it has ferny foliage at first, then opens into a mass of pinkish purple flowers, the heads of which unroll, like a fern, as the flowers open in succession. Normally sown in late April or early May, it generally starts to flower in early July in these parts.

It is seriously attractive to bees, and any other pollinators that may be around, and in the right conditions the whole field buzzes with all the insect life. The pollen varies in colour according to how the light catches it, appearing anything from black to vivid purple, but I could best describe it really as navy purple, but brighter and bluer in direct bright sunlight. It is very unusual and is a useful marker as to how far the bees will fly. Two years ago we had a small block in the middle of an area we frequent and considerable amounts of this were coming into apiaries fully 9 miles apart, from opposite sides of the field.

In 1998 there was a single field in our area, and an apiary at 5.5 miles away, including crossing a small hill, had several colonies bringing home some of this pollen. In this 1998 case a local farmer and ourselves co-operated in planting 55 acres of this stuff on one field, and we put in 44 hives of bees. In 3 weeks they produced 1.75 tonnes of nice white honey, so the nectar potential should also be remembered. In the last two years we have had a few humid days whilst it was flowering, and for a brief while the rate of nectar gathering was enormous. Help your local farmer by subsidising the seed a bit and you will get a major reward in yield most years. Seed available from most agricultural seed merchants, cost around £8 per kilo, and 3 kilos can do a hectare, although double that rate can be even better."

Food for thought for any of our farming members with a spare patch of set-aside?

There has been a great deal of interest in Open Mesh Floors recently, with a number of articles in the beekeeping press both here and in America. The main reasons for using these floors are to help control varroa and to improve wintering through better ventilation. However, it seems that the idea is not a new one (there's a surprise!) - Lloyd Spear writing in Bee Culture notes that there was an article in that magazine enthusing about 'screened bottom boards' in 1905, just one year after varroa was discovered on Apis Cerana.

A further benefit of OMFs that I have not seen mentioned before appeared in a posting to one of the Internet beekeeping newsgroups. It seems that they may help colonies under siege by wasps, as it is claimed that the wasps try to enter from underneath the screen, do not find the entrance and then give up. I must say that I find this difficult to believe - knowing how clever wasps can be - but I will try to have a look at my colonies on OMFs (see June Newsletter) to see if it is true. It would certainly be a major benefit in bad wasp years. [Stop Press: some wasps do find the entrance, but there were certainly fewer wasps around the colonies on OMFs; some were trying to enter from below].

Just a reminder that we have a great deal of information now on the website. The latest project has been to develop the 'Links & Resources' page which now has 333 links to useful and interesting sites - Associations, Suppliers, Research Departments, Fun sites for children (and their parents!) and so on. If you have access to the Internet do have a look. Visitor numbers are increasing steadily with 910 visitors to date. I even had a telephone call from a lady in Yorkshire taking me up on my offer - "if you need advice just give me a ring"- made in the July newsletter! I have also had two emails recently asking if I could supply honey. One from Northern Ireland, the other from Hong Kong! I had to refuse both as I do not wish to get into the export business - life is busy enough now.

Have you given me your email address? This can be useful for contacting members quickly and I can suppress the paper newsletters if you are happy to read it on the website (or via email) - it all saves the Association postage and helps keep the subscription down.