John Rouse4/12/03 7:50

In article , Sacha
writes
Will it help if I say that I know somebody who met Brother Adam? Only one
remove. ;-)

Our local Bee Inspector worked for Brother Adam for many years. He also
did the Radio 4 programme about the work of the bee inspector. He is
very helpful to our local beekeeping association. However even some of
his ideas are the subject of much debate at beekeeping meetings.

I'm sure all of us who have kept bees have read/heard the many particulars
of bees, their hives, moving them etc. etc. It's not exactly a secret
society though I suppose some would like to make it so.

Many of the rules of thumb come from experience, "less than three feet
or more than three miles" is a good rule if you want to keep all your
bees. Its also useful if you want to put a new hive on the site of the
existing one for swarm control, a frame of brood in the old hive will
keep the bees in there, and the flying bees will return to the new hive
and stay with the queen.

Beekeeping is moving on all the time. Open mesh floors are almost
standard in our area now, throughout the winter, though I'm hedging my
bets by keeping a colony on each....

John

I'm sure it is moving on. I hated giving up but my allergy was just too
dangerous to risk it and then, when I moved from Jersey to the UK, it became
a moot point anyway. I'd had one colony for 22 years and they'd performed
absolutely brilliantly. I tried to persuade a bee-keeping friend who was
one of my 'gurus' that it would be a good idea to take a nucleus but because
they had always been so well behaved and never even swarmed, he was most
reluctant to interfere with their balance, their self-regulation, in any
way. The very next year, the entire colony was wiped out with varroa and
the tracheal mite. It was horrible and although there was nothing I could
have done to prevent it, it made me feel as if I'd let them down, somehow.
Did Brother Adam write about bee-keeping - pressed or un-pressed? ;-)
He was The Great Man and Buckfast Abbey, where he lived and worked is very
close to us. I seem to remember some real nastiness from a new Abbot who
removed him from his work with the bees and put a new and younger monk in
his place.
How many years was he a bee-keeper? It seems like many decades.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the 'x' to email me)