Looking at the Menu.

When I first started beekeeping, an old hand advised me to visit all the local clubs and join the one that served the best teas. I've been keeping bees for thirty years now and have never regretted following his guidance. We have only just started to lay out the feast and Cara, who hosting this meeting, has chosen the prime spot for her supervisory role.

There is an old joke about a monk, sitting in a deck chair on a beach surveying all the scantily clad young ladies, when challenged about it being inappropriate behaviour for a man in his position he retorted that, “Just because I’m on a diet, it doesn’t mean that I can’t look at the menu.”

Cara's pet had phoned me a few days ago, complaining that he had seen a bee with Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) and, out of his six colonies, only one seemed to be in good heart. When it came to the inspection today, four of them looked to be in pretty good shape while the other two were amazingly well advanced for this time of the year. DWV, as with the other common viruses, is endemic in European bees; investigate any colony thoroughly enough and you're sure to find it. The best defence is to keep them fit and well. Compare it with many human diseases, pneumonia for example, it's everywhere; but, provided that you're otherwise healthy, it's not a problem, it only becomes one if you have other serious health issues: advancing years for example. The super-organism that is a bee colony doesn't suffer from old age, it is continually regenerating, but varroa, the blood sucking mite, will weaken the hive to the extent that the virus diseases that it passes on to the bees will kill them. At the moment, these have nothing to worry about and, given good weather will produce a fine crop off honey in the autumn.