A week or so ago someone posted a question on bekeepingforum.co.uk - "are
there any commercial treatment free beekeepers in the UK". Oh my gosh. I
looked again a couple of days ago and there were 579 responses. I do not
suggest you look at it - any thread that long has long since degenerated
into bile and name calling - but it gives an idea of the level of interest
in the subject now.
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One thing that seems to be being discussed around forums is the impact of
Brexit on imported bees. It looks like people will still be able to import
queens from Europe, but not packages of bees. Theoretically people are
already meant to send imported queens to the National Bee Unit to check for
parasites, but they don't do that now and don't expect to do it in future.
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There was another BIBBA <http://bibba.org.uk> webinar last night. 230
people attended, and taking into account the number of views of the
recorded lectures, the organisers say the series of lectures they've done
have been viewed by 5,000 people. That's quite an impact. BIBBA have mainly
been educating viewers about the value of local bees. BIBBA has less than
500 members, headed by half a dozen motivated individuals, as opposed to
the BBKA with 27,000 and layers of committees. I'm not aware of the BBKA
doing any public online things over lockdown, illustrating the difficulty
of responding to change for a large and complex organisation. I have to
admire BIBBA for seizing the opportunity of the lockdown and moving their
agenda on. (Their agenda overlaps with my own, although they are fixated on
manual intervention in the breeding process.)
Paul
