Hello :)
 
I have recently subscribed to bee-l.
 
My wife Sue and I presently run six colonies, mostly of New-Zealand/U.K.
crosses in Hampshire, England, and have been beekeepers here for about
six years now. It's a little cool here yet so our bees are still building
up and not yet causing us any control problems -- about another month
before swarming really gets started started.
 
I am Secretary of a local Beekeepers' Association here and I also edit
our newsletter. I have a specific interest in exchanging news, views
and articles suitable for this type of publication or for use in
discussion meetings. Inevitably, we also have interests is those subjects
that are not so close to bees -- we have a talk on hornets in April and
we have had talks on reptiles & fish in the past [not together :)].
We also have Dr. Larry Connor here at the end of April if anyone is near
at the time (28th).
 
To give some other background, our weather is mild and it doesn't rain
as much as the world thinks :). Our honey yields are modest to low at
around 50lb per colony in a reaonably good year. We have recently
confirmed the presence of Varroa and are going through the early stages
of mourning in which that seems inevitably to result (info especially
useful here). Both AFB and EFB are around but not _too_ serious. Acarine
is a minor problem for us _at_the_moment_ as local bees are relatively
resistant -- several good strains of UK queens were shipped to the States
for breeding a year or two back, I wonder how that went.  We don't have
Africanised bees. Our plants are often quite different here from the
States.
 
Thanks in advance for any responses, Bye for now,
 
        Gordon.