Skaters.

Travelled up to Perth for a meeting of the Scottish Beekeepers Association. A significant amount of time was spent discussing the lack of progress in sorting out the mess that is the insurance cover for the nation’s beekeepers since the meeting a year ago. It seems that the cover is “iffy” at any apiary meeting where visitors are present, or if more than one club is involved.
There was also the shambles created by the organisation of two separate meetings on the same day attended by two slightly different audiences (a couple of extra people in the afternoon) which meant that some of the presentations were given two airings creating a significant amount of annoyance. There’s an expression concerning piss-ups and breweries that comes to mind.
The highlight was a talk by a young PhD student who is developing a technique of breeding parasitic mites without a host; it’s a neat trick if he can perfect it though some of the audience failed to understand the significance of the development. If you can breed them in the lab all the year round, you can more easily develop new and interesting ways of killing them without harming any bees. The technique seems to be generating a lot of interest in academia. There followed an interesting discussion on the funding of such projects with the supervising professor claiming that half of his personnel (staff and students) and 90% of his funding come from the E.E.C. Hopefully, the world at large will realise the importance of such work and carry on supporting it.
 
The skating rink is in the same premises as the meeting and the café that provided our lunch was overlooking it. I was amused by the penguins that the younger kids were using for support, there were also some slightly larger snowmen for the slightly larger children.