81%... but where to next?

There are some wonderful macro-photographers posting pics
to the internet, so (with permission) I will use this one of a
worker by Tim Hill to head up this post. Thanks Tim.  

Our little group of 7 candidates for the Intermediate Level Beekeeping "written practical" exam taken back in March in Longford all passed. I got 81%, so I was delighted personally but pleased too for the group and especially pleased that we did well for our group leader, the Longford BKA 'Sec', Elspeth, who worked so hard preparing notes and hand outs for our study sessions. We are all very pleased with ourselves. This post will mainly be based around this process, so if you are not interested in beekeeping then you might like to click on by.

L'Aimant (The Lover) 

These 'courses' and exams are an important part of what the Federation of Irish Beekeeper Associations (FIBKA) does and there are plenty of them. If studying and exams are your thing you can progress through the baby-slopes of the half hour, 20 questions 'Preliminary' paper, through three 'Intermediate' exams, up to three 'Senior' exams after which you can call yourself a 'Bee Master'. Onwards and upwards there are then routes into 'proper' academia, with degrees in apiculture and equally high flying qualifications in honey production and so on. No doubt this is all important if you fancy a career in the commercial beekeeping world and these FIBKA certificates would be recognised internationally as proof of competence. Most people seem to do the exams for fun or just to prove they can.

Most of these exams have to be 'sat' in the FIBKA home-base at Gormanston, near Drogheda just north of Dublin, but if your County BKA can field a minimum number of candidates, FIBKA allow you to run the exams locally and appoint proper invigilators and send the papers out in sealed envelopes not to be opened before the exam time and in the exam hall. Hence our 'Magnificent Seven' in Longford. So, we did our study-group evenings and we took our exam and now we are all passed, proud owners of Intermediate Certs in "written practical" (hive and colony management). The obvious next step would be for us all to sit the Intermediate level "scientific" paper (bee biology and anatomy, honey chemistry, bee pheromones etc) followed by undergoing an apiary practical test where FIBKA examiners meet you at your own hives and test your competence at any number of manipulations and tasks - finding the queen, identifying types of queen cell, splitting colonies to produce 2nd hives or colonies and so on.

'Rhapsody in Blue'

Instead, I find myself at a bit of a crossroads and if you will bear with me, I will now ramble on in a rather disjointed, philosophical manner whilst I try to get my head round the problem. As I said - feel free to click on by. There are bee keepers and there are bee keepers - we range from the almost obsessive keeper who, like a golfing nut, spends all his time and money on the hobby, buying all the latest gadgets and gizmos, different types of hives, expensive honey extraction equipment, fancy suits, hive tools and smokers, fancy fuel for the smoker, chemicals and medication.

'Joseph's Coat'

These keepers are into the hives at every opportunity cracking the hive apart to inspect the colony condition, tweaking, manipulating, killing baby queens if they do not want them, trying out all the techniques they have learned, attempting to prevent any swarming, squeezing every ounce of honey production they can get out of the bees. They frequently extract so much honey that their bees would not have enough resources to see them through the winter, so these keepers have to feed back sugar syrup or fondant to replace the 'stolen' reserves. The bees must get no peace but these techniques work at the required level, so they have gone into the canon and are accepted practice among the FIBKA experts. These are the skills at which you must show competence in order to progress through the exam-machine and to be recognised by FIBKA as an expert and 'Bee Master'. These are also the things you are told you "must do" at BKA meetings. Going to meetings and getting involved in clubs are right up there with all the practical stuff you are obliged to learn to get on in the beekeeper world.

Red campion

At the other end of the scale are a much more laisséz faire bunch, some of whom are content to have bought their hive and their bees to look pretty in the garden and they are happy to sit back in the sun-lounger, watching the bees fly to and fro, happily buzzing round the flowers. They don't need the honey, so they don't even extract it. Down towards that end are a more recent group calling themselves 'Natural Beekeepers', who are not quite so laid back, but are mainly driven by the need to be green and ecological. They have bees to support the local population of pollinators but they do not fuss and interfere with the colonies, they try never to use chemicals on their bees (varroa mite pesticides for example) - you will just end up with a colony of bees which needs man and chemicals to survive, they argue. Far better to let the bees 'learn' over time to groom off the mites.

Fruit scones from the baker's assistant.

These guys tend to be viewed sceptically by the 'experts' - weirdo hippies and eco-warriors. There is no real place for them in FIBKA although, to be fair, they do get a slot in the FIBKA magazine and the 'Natural' way does get air-time in the FIBKA conferences. Also I do not think they would meet the exam standards, so they are never going to make 'Bee Master' unless they can talk a good game on the day.

My 'crossroads' is because I am starting to baulk at the demands and advice to constantly interfere, examine, poke and prod, and I am much more inclined to watch them from outside the hive and, if they look healthy to me, leave them be. I know I 'should' be checking for varroa mites, for example, and treating with the latest 'drug' recommended by the experts, but plenty of feedback has come down to say that these chemicals can kill or damage the queen, make the bees abscond or, just as bad, not work anyway. The one we used last year, called MAQS is basically a formic acid fumigant which is so honkingly strong that you choke when you are out in the open air peeling open the packaging - you then stick the strips into an 18 inch cube enclosed box  (the hive) with little ventilation and expect it to diffuse right down into the capped larval cells to kill the mites without harming the bees. Hmmm. No wonder we beginners are confused and start to doubt the official view.

Mum turkey starts a new secret egg stash
down between the poly tunnel and the
caravan

I find myself not at all sure I want to be that kind of expert. My current tendency is to go with the Natural Beekeepers and minimise my interference and poking, and possibly to withdraw from the exam-taking path. One strong factor tries to draw me in again. Our 'leader' Elspeth, mentioned in the first paragraph is a Scot and comes from that generation of Scottish girls who were, rather appallingly, never allowed to do science at school. Girls would not need science, it was decided by the Scottish education authorities, so they were not let do it and Elspeth, at this later stage finds herself protesting this by her determination to learn the stuff and sit the exam just to show them. She was so good to us last time round that I expect there is not one among the other 6 of us who do not feel that if she can do it, then we all ought to damned well stand by her and support her through it. Come September, when we have to sign up or not, it will be interesting to see how many of we science-trained blokes are on the list.

I am sorry if that was a bit long winded, but it is a post that has been building up in the back-burners of my brain and needed unloading, venting onto this blog. Blogging as catharsis, if you like. One wise 'old timer' in our club, a beekeeper of 50+ years experience who has never taken one of these exams in his life, just smiles and says "It doesn't matter what you do in the end; the bees will do their own thing anyway!"

New garden strip all dug over. 

The main news to tag onto the end is that we have finished digging the new garden strip out front, so that can now get its membrane, fancy gravel and plants. We are also going to move the roses from the 'Rose Walk' into here. They do OK in there but suffer from the thug-weed 'creeping buttercup' getting in amongst them, so we have fun times ahead lifting them, root-washing them to get out all traces of the buttercup and then dropping them into the new site where, we hope, the weed cannot jump into bed with them.

Then today, on a run down to Roscommon town the car went sick on us again, which is a bit of a nuisance. It made some odd noises, ran hot for a while but then cooled down again, seemed to lose power so that we stopped to take a look under the bonnet (and turned the engine off, obviously) to find it smelling of very hot oil and smoking off some the oil that inevitably builds up on old engines. We had to get it recovered back to our garage in Lough Glynn where our excellent 'man who can' is now looking at it. We suspect head gasket or some other serious problem but of course (wouldn't you know it) when the guy fired it up after its nice cooling period in Roscommon and on the lorry, it fired up beautifully and ran as smoothly as you'd like. More on this story when we know what's what.

That's all (S)he Wrote

Done with the bee exam, a restorative Guinness

Huge relief at this end today as we make another milestone on our chug through these busy months; I survived my big beekeeping exam this morning over in Longford. This was a 'proper' exam like I can remember them from A levels and University; 3 hours of tough fast writing and rapidly compiling all the material you have revised and forced into your skull in the course of our "bee school" study groups, book reading and internet training videos. 5 questions to answer (Answer question 1 and any 4 from the remaining 7 (some of which were two part either/or style). A proper exam 'hall' with the official invigilator seated at one end, the time-set clock running and dead silence.

Those lambs take shelter from the rain.

Well, we all survived and everyone seemed to be writing a good few reams - I covered 13 sides of A4 but we had all agreed that we would do no post-mortems. Our main comment was that we were all 'of a certain age' and had not written anything like that amount on paper with an actual pen for about 30 years or more, so the hand cramps were killing on occasion and I saw everybody putting down pens and flexing and unflexing fingers to try to get some mobility back into the digits.

Who's the cutest? Probably not the one in the middle, anyway!

As I was going to be in Longford for at least 3 hours, Liz had taken the opportunity to  come with me to the town and try out the shopping potential - Longford is an hour's drive, so we have not really explored it much,though I was much impressed by the Christmas lights up the main street. So we parted in the Tesco car park at 09:00 and off Liz went to suss out Birthday presents for brother and Mum and may also have accidentally bought a replacement laptop for our ancient, ex-work, over-heating problem machine.

Replacement brain-food, Hester's of Castlerea do
a most excellent bacon and cabbage. 

She was then outside at 12:30 to gather a rather shell-shocked husband up and take him off for a restorative lunch and a couple of pints of the black stuff. This being a treat for me, I got to choose the place and my current favourite 'pub lunch' is the bacon and cabbage at Hester's "Golden Eagle" in Castlerea and a pint or two of their beautiful Guinness. I will not find out whether I have passed for months if FIBKA's speed on the preliminary exam marking is anything to go by but I find I don't mind that much. I have given it my best shot and the 13 pages, well, that's all he wrote, it's done now and too late to worry about it.

A nose smeared with Mum's milk and decorated with a long strand
of her wool. Perhaps we'll use those to tell them apart?

Although this was a serious exam, nothing hangs on it, I can keep bees anyway and I am not using the qualification to try to get a job in the commercial honey industry, it was just for fun. It is also just one third of the three you must take to achieve full intermediate status. There is another more science and biology based paper (anatomy, development, physiology, pheromone chemistry and the like as compared to this paper which was on bee-keeping and hive management) and then there is a hive session where the examiners visit you at your own apiary and make you jump through hoops to prove you know what you are doing. I am not sure whether the Longford BKA will be volunteering for either of these, which they would presumably do in 2016 and 2017 respectively. We will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Early pollen for the bees. Willow.

For now I can put all the books, mags and printed notes away back in their proper shelves and swap over to reading something easy and light instead of the learnéd tomes by Ted Hooper, David Cramp and Claire and Adrian Waring, enjoyable though they were. My lovely relieved feeling joins the flood already established of relief at the lambing which as well as going amazingly well, managed to avoid the bee exam - I was eye-ing that Polly up a little nervously and pleading with her not to do it to me on exam morning. That might have been too much distraction.

Pulmonaria putting on a good show.

Those two things have been a real focus and we can now mentally move on to this weekend's celebrations in Silverwood of the two family birthdays, then Easter. Then we have a stint of Liz being away again (back in Silverwood) supporting one parent while the other takes a break in the sun, possibly my own birthday if it doesn't get lost in the scrum (!), the arrival soon of pigs and all other spring into summer 'ground-rush' events. Possibly even some first 2015 bee hive inspections (I might know what we're at now). It's all go.

A good use for cold roast lamb and the left over suet - mini pies

Meanwhile the baby lambs are thriving on their mother's ample milk and have had a few visiting admirers - even Bob. They are starting to explore their field now as they follow Polly at her grazing and you see them bouncing around on all four tip-toes (it's called "pronking" in deer, but I'm not sure if that applies to lambs). They seem to retreat to the field shelter at night or to get out of the rain. I have had to start feeding the families a distance apart, or the babies mill around the troughs and the grown-ups feel the need to head-butt them away from the food, even though they are not trying to get any. Onwards and upwards.

Rough Winds Do Shake....

Quince blossom.

We are neither of us very impressed by this weather and we would like to be able to hand May back in and stick with our April, if that is OK with everyone. The lovely warm days of April have been replaced by a continuous fitful Sou'Westerly bluster which brings in showers and long bursts of that heavy drizzle that only seems to happen in Ireland and which they call 'soft'. A good bit of our fruit is currently in bloom and it is being badly blown about - rough winds indeed DO shake the darling buds of May.

Apple blossom (Red Windsor, here)

The poor quince has a lot of big leaves on by now so it seems to catch more wind than the top fruit, the tree rocks about so that I debate whether to stake it higher up and the big, soft, delicate blooms quickly get brown edged wind-burn to the petals, as do trees like Magnolia stellata. I worry that the blooms will manage to get pollinated before they are reduced to wet brown rag. There are very few bees of any kind in this breeze and no hover flies either but there does seem to be a good population of a narrow, black, soft-bodied looking fly in among the flowers; perhaps they will pollinate the trees by sheer weight of numbers.

Winter cress (?) growing as a weed in our raised bed. 

Talking of bees, we have finally received our first copy of the magazine of the Federation of Irish Beekeepers' Associations (FIBKA). This mag, called 'An Beachaire' (The Beekeeper) contains an article about doing pollinator surveys for the National Biodiversity database (similar to what we do with the birds and mammals). These people need you to agree to walk a set route at least once a month and record the bumble bees you see, and they supply you with a wealth of info and pictures which will help the beginners (like me) to identify them and know which species to expect.

The ex-Hastings fig may only be 18"
high but it is still trying to fruit!

They seem to be happy to have some seriously doubtful data while you are learning and getting your eye in, and do not expect you to dive straight as able to tell queens, workers and drones across the 20+ species. Well, I walk the dogs every day and I am quite happy to keep my eyes open for bees as I stroll along. Indeed, since we have been interested in honey bees I have been doing this anyway and mentally trying to distinguish my Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) from my white-tailed BB (B. lucornum) and my buff-tailed BB (B. terrestris). I have had to submit my 2 favourite dog walks as 'transects' to be used in the study. Thank you, too, Pud Lady who sent me in the post a "Bee Saver" pack which came to her house from Friends of the Earth promoting something called the "Bee Cause" but which included a load of charts and pictures about making your garden bee friendly AND an identification wall chart. I call that timely.

A bit frayed by the wind, Cambria's old "bob"

Meanwhile, barking up a completely different tree, I need to thank my old chums from the Sailing Barge Cambria (for which project I still maintain the website, keep blogging and now 'Tweeting' and, with Liz, produce their Newsletter ( http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/?page_id=1211 ). The winter re-fit of this lovely old Thames 'sailorman' (108 years old in theory, but mainly now a very young 3 years of age!) involved the replacement of her "bob". This is the flag flown at the top of the main rig which was partly to advertise the company colours but also to work as a 'burgee' telling the helmsman the wind direction and strength.

Cambria flying the bob from the topm'st head (arrowed)

When Cambria was in trade, the (Everard's of Greenhithe) bob would have been red left and right, white top and bottom. When she was sold off by Everard's to her famous and final Skipper-in-Trade, Cap'n Bob Roberts, he chose blue and white. Now 'we' (The Cambria Trust) have her the Board decided to go with red white and blue combining both the stages of her story, but then a bit of green to denote that we were engine-less and therefore a green form of transport. The first of these flags went on when she first sailed as a re-launched restoration and had been out in the weather getting shredded by the winds (rough and otherwise!) for the first season, after which it was claimed by colleague, Dave B. I am honoured and delighted to have been chosen by the Team to receive the 2nd one, an important piece of barge history. I will treasure it and keep it safe and sound. It might look like a tatty ol' bit of flag cloth to you but it certainly isn't to me. Thank You the Cambria Trust.

First Day in (Bee) School

Rain or shine, the dogs need walking

It has begun. Last night saw us off into the night of forecast rain and wintry showers, headed for Longford's "Teagasc" (pronounced "Chug-usk"; it is the training rooms and meeting centre laid on in the middle of town by the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, a big concern here). This was for lesson one in our 'Bee School', actually a lecture on Bee Health given by our new friend Mary H of "The Two Marys". It was a big room and there were 15 or so of us in class, taking this Preliminary Certificate from the Federation Of Irish Bee Keepers' Associations (FIBKA) and the lecture was a Power-point style presentation (mercifully lacking in all the worst Power-point excesses of animations and zoomy graphics) with hand outs to save you having to write too many notes. We now know more about keeping your hive stress-free and healthy, promoting colony health and sorting out those diseases that do arise, than any two people should know who have not yet met their first colony.

I also got from Mary the two hive frame 'runners' we failed to bring away with us when we went to collect the flat packs, so that today I was able to finish my (empty) hive. In the 'any questions' section at the end we were also able to establish that, yes, rabbits are OK as a method of keeping the grass short around hives - the rabbits will not upset the bees and vice versa and also that yes, we can paint the whole thing (outside only) in gloss white. This as long as we check the paint tin first to check that it doesn't say 'harmful to insects'. We have six of these lectures at fortnightly intervals and some practical apiary sessions leading up to our exam in May which is part written and part practical at the hive. We will be experts before we even own a bee but that, I guess, is only right. They are vital livestock with an important role on the 'farm' and also potentially dangerous as well as possibly being involved in the production of food which you might want to sell to the general public.

You can see from these pictures that the advance of Spring took a bit of a back seat today and let winter have another go at painting the scenery white; a little bit Christmas Card. It had frozen overnight (which is always a welcome relief to me in the morning when I am doing my feed and release rounds - I am nipping round on ground as hard as putty and crunching over little ice patches which were formerly shallow puddles instead of slopping through the mud and wet). It started snowing at about 08:30 and then kept on all day doing light but impressive 'blizzards' which then gave way to sunny gaps which cleared up the preceding fall before the next. Bob was round this afternoon predicting a heavy fall tonight which will 'stick' but we'll wait and see on that one. Met Éireann have us getting the next anti-cyclone in the neck overnight, this one called 'Ruby', but they have been famous for their rain rather than snow. I have no idea how we got to 'Ruby'; I am sure the last two were Christine and Brigid.

In the pigs department, I have found and booked myself onto a pig rearing course down in Co. Tipperary in early April. We have also found a possible source of Tamworth piglets down in Co. Kildare. These babies are currently only a glint in their Mums' eyes. The breeder had just finished selling his first batch of Tamworth x Gloucester Old Spots (50 of them!) and was now getting his Tammy gilts back in pig but by a Tamworth boar this time. Pigs gestate for the conveniently easy to remember period of 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days, bringing us round to June, and then would need 6-8 weeks weaning, so we are looking at July. That gives me plenty time to go on the course and to do my fencing and build my ark.

Bramble jelly drips through the bag.

The limping Guinea Fowl, Henry is still limping, no better but no worse. He seems to be getting about OK, still mixes it with the chickens and jealously protects the pecking order slot of his lady, Min as well as getting his own share of any food. We'll just keep an eye on him and hope that he starts to get better soon. We rediscovered our batches of frozen blackberries picked from Bob's hedgerows and decided to turn them into bramble jelly. I seem to have lost my 'jam-setting' mojo and struggled at first to get this slop to set but then Liz suggested chucking in more sugar and suddenly I had it setting in spoons, on test saucers, in the scum-scraping spoon and nearly in the jam pan. I got it into jars in a bit of a hurry and I think it's going to be OK. Pass me that kango hammer, I need to chisel off some jam. In the egg dept I just need to report a 'personal best' / house record: 9 eggs today from 11 hens plus a goose egg. Go the girls!

Lastly I was amazed and flabbergasted by the reaction I got to the picture of washing drying on the line, I posted a few days back. 'What's amazing about washing?' I hear you ask. I had posted the pic as a joke because it was the first time we'd been able to dry anything outdoors since about December, what with all the rain. A friend from college days now living in the USA told me she was amazed and was thinking of doing it that 'old way' which she'd not done since leaving the UK in the 80's. In fact, she said, it was actually illegal to dry your washing out doors and that lately people had been objecting to this ban and there are whole political movements and serious politicians involved. It all came out of some rich folks living in posh 'gated' communities thinking that someone else's undies flapping in the wind was an eye-sore and was presumably latched onto by the white-goods manufacturing industry. Now the move to re-instate it as an activity is coming out of the green, energy-saving factions. I was just gob-smacked and completely thrown by this. Only in America, I would think.... but you never know.