AT the February meeting of Okehampton Beekeepers’, members received a talk by Dr Lea Bayly, former British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) Education Officer and Chair of the Tavistock Branch.

Lea is also an active member of Devon Apicultural Research Group (DARG) and her talk focussed on management of risk within honey bee colonies.

The meeting, held at Whiddon Down Village Hall, was attended by some 20 to 30 members.

Lea’s presentation very effectively borrowed the terminology of the Stock Market to portraying bees’ approach to risk management.

The honeybee colony was considered as a system in its own right, behaving as a single entity, incorporating self-righting constant feedback and resource management to ensure survival. Throughout her talk, Lea reiterated the advantages of locally originating queens which have evolved to adapt to the local environment.

She has been involved in the B4 Project to bring back the native Celtic black bee. The indigenous black bee displays many genetic traits which maximise its survival chances in the north European environment.

Many aspects of honeybee behaviour were considered. The reproductive mechanism of swarming was evaluated as a high risk, but potentially high reward strategy when compared to supercedure.

Lea made the interesting observation that following a good summer there will be an increased prevalence of colonies originating from swarms and conversely poor summers will reduce the success rate of swarming, increasing the proportion of supercedure colonies.

She likened this to the investment strategy of “Balancing the Portfolio”.

Lea also compared different mating strategies, juxtaposing the benefits of genetic diversity obtained by high-flying queens who fly up to drone congregation areas against the inherent risks of an extended mating flight.

She also spoke about apiary vicinity mating, gene transmission, foraging behaviour, disease risk, responsible beekeeping, swarm control and the development by queen-selection of good-tempered bees.

The session was followed by many questions from the audience, after which Vice Chair, Simon O’Sullivan, thanked Lea for a fascinating and very well researched analysis of colonies’ approach to risk. This was reinforced by Ray King, who has been both secretary and chairman of Okehampton Branch and is also an active member of DARG.

Our next meeting will be held on Thursday, March 10 at Whiddon Down Village Hall. This will be a talk by the charity, “Hives Save Lives” and chairman Peter Venton will describe their work in Uganda to develop beekeeping to improve living conditions for the local population.

WP