Just got back from one of the small bee conferences: a monthly meeting of the Devon Apicultural Research Group, DARG.


Our chairman, Richard Ball, does a daily count of the mite drop in his hives and uses a standard formula prescribed by the ministry to calculate therefrom the number of mites in the hives. Recently he began to doubt the accuracy of the formula and,  for the first time in years (mites became immune about 15 years ago hereabouts) applied chemical strips. The drop was massive, many times more than predicted as he showed us by graphs.

DARG was recently awarded some prize money by Vita Ltd for its work on a project relating to drone laying queens. Our webmaster, Glyn Davies, showed us slides produced on a scanning electron microscope of sections of the spermathecae of drone layers, which seem to be on the increase, especially young ones. The outer membrane of the spermathecae appear to be disrupted. Speculation is that it is as a result of virus infection but there's no proof yet.

Unfortunately the study, so far, has been uncontrolled as nobody was willing to hand over healthy, laying, queens to be sliced up. We hope, this year, to get over this by begging queens from commercial beekeepers who routinely replace queens and by rearing a few ourselves in mini nucs for the purpose.

If you can find your way round our website the pictures are there for all to see. Some of the scientists among you might have comments to make, either to the webmaster, or via me, directly or (with Aaron's consent) here.

Chris

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