Newsletter of the Beekeepers Association of the ACT Incorporated

Meetings of the Beekeepers Association of the ACT Inc are held on the second Wednesday of the month at 7.30 pm at the CIT, Heysen Street, Weston in Building A

 

April 2000

 

Autumn Shutdown Demo

Cec Mercer has kindly agreed to hold a short demonstration of shutting down hives for winter, at his apiary on Mugga Lane (between Binks Concrete and the Tip) at 2 p.m. on Saturday 8^th April, weather permitting. Bring a veil, etc. because the bees may not be happy.

 

April Meeting

Our April meeting will be held on 12^th at CIT Weston at 7.30 p.m. We would like a good turnup to provide feedback on our suggested program of activities for the year (see below), and makeup of the newsletter.

 

New Office Bearers

The following willing souls were elected at the Annual General Meeting in March:

President: David Lillis 62965571

Vice President: Graham Turner 65219422

Secretary: Mark Hosking 62574777

Treasurer: Graham Turner

Newsletter Peter Macnicol 62814713

Committee Roy Bray 62583433

Robert Gardiner 62310383

Julie McCarron-Benson 62396403

Lyn Shiels 62862421

 

Location of Library

At present the library is at Herb Waldie’s house in Garran. Please phone first (62813658) if you’d like to go and borrow a book. We are reviewing options for future accomodation of the library.

 

President’s Report

Well, another year is over and what a busy one it has been! Welcome to all those new members who joined up throughout the year. Thank you all for your support as I’m a rookie at this sort of thing. The thought of being president was a little daunting at first, to say the least, but has proved to be an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Some of the year’s activities included a field trip to Bingley’s Commercial Apiary, attending the NSW Apiary Association State Conference and Field Day on the South Coast, Derek’s report from the Bee Disease Steering Committee, liaising with Environment ACT in relation to government bee policies.

Our mid year dinner at the Royal Canberra Yacht Club was a big hit thanks to the efforts of Julie McCarron-Benson. Also thanks to Dick Johnston for opening his home to us for the Christmas Get Together.

Some of our members gave talks to other local groups regarding honey bees’ lifestyle and behaviours. For this I thank you all.

As was recorded in the recent newsletter our efforts at this year’s Royal Canberra Show were a fantastic success and I look forward to bigger things next time.

This year saw a number of members taking trips abroad and visiting apiaries on their travels. Thanks for your reports.

Thanks too to all our guest speakers, those local and interstate. It surely makes meetings more interesting and encourages member participation.

Once again, thanks to my committee for your support and all the best to the incoming committee for the year 2000.

 

Tentative Program for 2000

A think-tank met recently to come up with the following tentative programme of talks and events (weekend activities in italics) for the association over the coming year. If you have any comments or better suggestions, please let a committee member know and we’ll consider your input…after an appropriate bribe.

Date	Month	Topic	Possible Speaker
12	April	Overseas Trip and Honey Judging	Rob Gardiner
8	April	Autumn shut-down demo (CIT Weston?)	Ces Mercer
10	May	Innovations in Equipment	Led by Dominic; contributions from members
14	June	Mead Making (and Testing?)	Demo?
12	July	Commercial Beekeeping	Des Cannon, Bingleys, or other
?	July	Mid-Winter Madness (Social Picnic)
9	August	Spring Management	Doug Sommerville or other
13	September	Dinner (coincides with School Holidays)	Empty Super Award
11	October	Flora, In and Around Canberra	SGAP rep?
	October	Not a Hive Crawl
8	November	Extraction Demo’ and Honey Judging Refresher
13	December	Christmas Function (instead of formal meeting)
10	January	No meeting
14	February	Preparations for the Canberra Show (bring competition honey)
14	March	TBA (+ AGM)

The same Mensa qualified think-tank has also decided that a change in the format of our general meetings is needed to increase the attraction to new (and long-time) members, focus our attention on beekeeping aspects, and generally keep people awake. The suggestion is that a "business" meeting is held from 7:30 to 8:00 pm, before the general open meeting starts at 8:00 pm.

Committee members are expected to attend the business meeting, with the aim of dealing with the more mundane aspects of operating the association (such as correspondence and treasurers report). Please note that all members are still welcome to attend the business meeting. Be assured, that if there are matters that need wider consideration of the association, they will be discussed in the general open meeting. (Any business not able to be dealt with by 8:00 pm will be carried over to the next meeting or considered by the committee off-line.)

So the bottom line is: if you would just like to hear some interesting talk on beekeeping, see some demo’s and have a good natter over a cuppa with other colleagues who also get stung and sticky, then just rock up at 8 pm.

And in our effort to focus the meetings on interests of beekeepers, we want to keep developing our Q&A segment. To give this more structure and prevent it degenerating into 32 separate conversations, we’d like to use a "panel of experts" who will field the questions. In the unlikely event that the panel is stumped for words of advice, they can always seek input from the floor. In our infinite wisdom (and recognising our novice level of experience), we’d like to volunteer Herb and Ces as panel members, with a guest member selected on the night.

 

The Newsletter

We’d like to have feedback on two points. First, it has been suggested that members might like to have a "question and answer" or "letter to the editor" section. Second, some members may prefer to get their newsletter by Email, so we need to know how many would like this.

 

Talk to Belconnen Ladies Probus Club 28.2.00

I arrived at 10.45 in response to an invitation to join the ladies for morning tea before giving a short talk of about 25 minutes and time for questions of about 20 minutes.

After a pleasant time chatting informally over morning tea I spoke about the hive Organisation; queen, workers and drones; the life cycle of bees and tasks performed by workers at various stages of life. The seasonal tasks and pleasures of beekeeping completed the talk.

Question time allowed people to ask about their own interests and concerns as well as more detail about aspects of the talk. There were many questions including bee biology, communication between bees, several about dealing with swarms and other problems, a question about "killer bees" and some about different varietal types of honey and honey extraction.

The feral hive caused much interest as did various photographs. The audience were interested in all aspects of bees and beekeeping and I certainly had an enjoyable morning spreading a little knowledge and enthusiasm.

Lyn Shiels

 

Bee Incidents

The following is part of a memorandum from the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council by its Chairman, Laurie Dewar on 20 March 2000.

"As industry is aware, there have been a number of incidents of bad publicity. The tragic death of a mother in Sydney following an attack by a swarm of bees is an extremely rare and unfortunate incident. Unfortunately the media focused heavily on this event despite the fact that it is only the second death to occur in New South Wales from managed bees since 1954.

Details of the Sydney incident are still unclear so the exact cause of the attack is unknown. Bees have been kept on the premises for some years without problems. Something would have had to disturb the bees to prompt such a fierce defence of their colony. At this point in time it is only speculation but it is believed that the hive was disturbed or the bees provoked in some way.

Following this incident there have been three other reported incidents. These include the attack on two dogs in a saleyard on the North Coast of New South Wales; the reported attack of a young child in Wagga; and a swarm attacking dogs in Sydney. It is unfortunate that the media's interest, heightened by the death of the Sydney mother, has resulted in an overwhelming amount of adverse publicity. The chances of a fatality, however, are extremely rare."

 

Hive Spacer

Lyn and Paddy Shiels showed members the following spacer at the February meeting. They say it stops bees clustering outside the hive in hot weather.

 

Giant Bees Found on Vessel

From a recent newspaper article: A container ship was quarantined in Brisbane yesterday after large numbers of giant honey bees (Apis dorsata) were found on board.

Quarantine officers were called to the Kota Serakat yesterday morning after wharfies discovered bees on a container they were unloading.

An entomologist later identified the bees as giant honey bees, not previously present in Australia, which would threaten the nation's honey industry if allowed to escape.

Kieth Murray, of the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service, said the bees were about 1.5 times larger than the European honey bee found in Australia. He said the bees had the potential to seriously affect honey production in Australia if they took hold here.

"They would compete in a major way with our current honey producing bees and they also carry diseases," Mr Murray said. "Of major concern is a parasite it carries which is an external mite. Our European bees are relatively free from these sort of parasites and it's known from overseas experience that these mites would be devastating to the bee population in Australia."

A commercial pest controller had treated the ship.

"This is serious but we believe we’ve contained it," Mr Murray said.

 

Bees Help Truck Factory

The following is an article by Eric Bonabeau and Guy Thérmaulaz reported in Scientific American, March 2000.

 

In a honeybee colony, individuals specialize in certain tasks, depending on their age. Older bees, for example, tend to be the foragers for the hive. But the allocation of tasks is not rigid: when food is scarce, younger nurse bees will forage, too.

 

Using such a biological system as a model, we have worked with Michael Campos of Northwestern University to devise a technique for scheduling paint booths in a truck factory. In the facility the booths must paint trucks coming out of an assembly line, and each booth is like an artificial bee specializing in one colour. The booths can change their colors if needed, but doing so is time-consuming and costly.

 

Because scientists have yet to understand exactly how honey- bees regulate their division of labor, we made the following assumption: an individual performs the tasks for which it is specialized unless it perceives an important need to perform another function. Thus, a booth with red paint will continue to handle orders of that colour unless an urgent job requires a white truck and the other booths, particularly those specializing in white, have much longer queues.

 

Although this basic rule sounds simplistic, in practice it is very effective. In fact, a honeybeelike system enables the paint booths to determine their own schedules with higher efficiency-specifically fewer colour changes-than a centralized computer can provide. And the method is adept at responding to changes in consumer demand. If the number of trucks that need to be painted blue surges unexpectedly, other booths can quickly forgo their specialty colors to accommodate the unassigned vehicles. Furthermore, the system copes easily with glitches. When a paint booth breaks down, other stations compensate swiftly by immediately divvying up the additional load.

 

 

Rose Cottage Market

 

The proprietor is looking for a stall holder to sell honey; contact Sharon on 62601190.

 

Bindaree Beenotes: Dick has plenty of tubs and containers for your honey surplus.

 

 

 

Go to BINDAREE BEE SUPPLIES

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