Looking back at Bee Craft April 25, 50 and 100 years ago
1920 1970 1995
As military conscription ended in Britain, Turks fought the French in Urfa to stop the area becoming part of Syria, and Canada won the first Olympic gold medal in ice hockey in Antwerp…
Queen-balling explained? ‘Cheshire’ thought that queen-balling was frequently caused by alien bees entering the wrong hive and atacking the queen. “The queen’s own children, under a misapprehension, follow suit until all the colony is in the same condition of ferment as though a strange queen had been dropped amongst them.”
Other hornets a century ago “An Egyptian beekeeper’s life is not all honey. From a native hive, he may obtain at utmost 14lbs of honey each year. His bees have to contend with hornets from July to December. During this time brood rearing almost ceases, and the bees are afraid to leave their hives, as the hornets are waiting to devour them.”
Marie Celeste déjà vu “In October on going around my hives, I saw plenty of bees. A week later there was not one dead or live bee leſt in one hive; all had completely gone away.”
As “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” on Apollo 13 entered the lexicon, Mirian Hargeave passed her driving test at the 40th atempt and Paul McCartney announced that The Beatles were spilting up…
Disc The new disc entrance to hives was hailed by BW Bielby of the West Riding as “the ultimate weapon in beekeeping – for good or evil”. Some thought to stop swarms by closing the entrance during the swarming period! Others considered shuting unwanted drones in when a queen was on her mating flight.
DIY beekeeping Doing it yourself was all the rage. SA Harris of Portsmouth presented quite detailed instructions about building a bee house. Air Commodore JMD Kerr RAF (retd) advocated a DIY bee vacuum. JHB Rawson of Wilton, Salisbury, recommended all manner of hive stands and a stock of broken curving earthenware tiles in the apiary to level them. Eric Warne of Cambridge suggested another method to wire frames.
Bumblebee concern Conservation, the watchword of the year, was catching on. Lack of knowledge of bumblebees led to the first atempts to map their distribution nationally by the Bee Research Institute (now IBRA) and the Biological Records Centre.
Sugar price to dye for Denatured sugar without dye was at last on sale for beekeepers – at less than 1p per kilo in bulk.
Bee Craſt April 2020
As Father Ted premiered on Channel 4, the Oklahoma bombing took place and Take That sang that they were Back for Good…
Norman Carreck’s debut In his first article for Bee Craſt, Norman Carreck, then of IACR Rothamsted, wrote about the pollination requirements of arable crops. In 1943, Colin Butler had estimated that each British colony contributed £12 (1943 prices) to the nation annually. By 1995, the EU estimated a European total of £3 billion. In 1995, the emphasis, said Norman, was not ‘does a plant need pollination’, but rather ‘how far will an individual bee carry pollen’ – an especially important factor to growers of seed crops.
Adrian Waring’s debut In his new position as general secretary of the BBKA, Adrian Waring began a column in Bee Craſt. He appealed to beekeepers to stem the flow from the craſt as a result of the recent arrival of the varroa mite, and paid tribute to the newly appointed regional bee inspectors.
Open-mesh floors With the arrival of varroa in many parts of the country, Alistair Reid had begun a small survey of the overwintering of bees on open-mesh floors. His provisional finding was that open-mesh floors scored well in most health terms, but seemed to encourage chalkbood.
A jumbo legacy In a tribute to Jack Tredwell of Sparsholt College, Hampshire, it was noted that he leſt a fiting legacy across the county – the Jumbo Langstroth hive.
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