Visit to the Beekeeping Spring Convention, Stoneleigh

The BBKA spring convention is held at the National Agricultural Centre at Stoneleigh every year on the third or fourth week of April, This year the season was well behind last year when we had a heat wave and were getting concerned about a severe drought (how wrong we were). Clive de Bryn was running a workshop on queen rearing, how he managed to demonstrate queen rearing when our bees have only just started drone cells and queen cells are being torn down, I don't know. Still Clive is a resourceful chap and I'm sure his students will have spent a profitable day with him.
The exhibitors were similar to last year and I didn't spot anything new that excited me but I did chat to the producers of varroa control methods which may help in the coming season.

The highlight of the convention for me was the talk by Murray Reid from AsureQuality in New Zealand. His talk was on re-queening using cells and without finding and removing the old queen.This is a method we have been working with since Sam came back from New Zealand, so it was of particular interest to me.
I won't go into detail of his talk but the main points that we will find useful are as follows:

1. When grafting queen cells the starter hive should be queenless to take advantage of the emergency impulse to build cells. You can have lots of cells in a starter colony up to 30 or 40.
The finisher hive should however be queenright to replicate the supercedure impulse to encourage the bees to produce well fed cells before they are sealed. The finisher should take fewer cells say up to 20. You will therefore need more than one finisher if you are raising in excess of 20 cells in a batch.
2. Feed the donor or breeder hives with sugar syrup mixed with pollen or pollen substitute. Forcing the bees to use the extra protein as it's not in a form that can be stored. This produces cells with larvae swimming in royal jelly, easy for grafting. The same treatment for starter and finisher hives will produce well fed larvae in queen cells.
3. Use hose or irrigation pipe for queen cell protectors.
4. Place cells high in the second brood chamber or in the supers during the summer to replicate the conditions of supercedure.
It was encouraging to learn that we are on the right track with our methods and the improvements gleaned from Murray Reids' talk will improve our performance.

In the afternoon I attended the Bee Farmers annual meeting which went well, I was impressed with the committees effort during last year to work with DEFRA on the bee health strategy and their attempts to get the regional meetings under way. We will see what comes of their efforts in the near future.