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.