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Behind the veil: Michael Minter
Michael was, until a year ago, our delegate to the BBKA. You see before you, therefore, a man who has fought for sanity in fourteen consecutive Annual Delegates� Meetings and lived to tell the tale! Michael was always extremely thorough in his approach to this job, and has raised the stature of the CBKA by espousing sensible, forward-looking policies at Stoneleigh. His regular reports-back from the discussions were an extremely useful link for the Cheshire committee with what was happening at national level. However, I was interested in his beekeeping....
How did you hit on the idea of taking up beekeeping?
My first contact with beekeeping was at some distance! I inherited a small fruit farm in Kent, which had bees on it. However, I was forced to sell it. Beekeeping was not on the agenda and certainly our garden at the time was not bee-friendly. It was only a few years later and having acquired a large enough garden that I became actively interested. A motivation for this was probably that I had always liked honeycomb.
So how did you get started?
Having decided to have a go, Val and I were put in touch with Bill Horn. Bill was then Secretary of the Wirral Branch of the CBKA and later became President of the CBKA. We went along to our first Branch meeting in October 1974, and picked up the rudiments at the Branch meetings that year, which contained many �beginner-friendly� talks. In May 1975, on Bill�s advice we acquired a small colony with a 1974 Queen from Bill Burgess (CBKA President). We had purchased a WBC hive through the Branch so we were all set - so we thought!!
Who were the main influences on your beekeeping?
Bill Horn had started me off using a WBC hive, which suited our garden. �Principles of Practical Beekeeping� by Robert Couston was my bible. Very experienced Wirral members such as Bill Horn, David Frimston, Bill Corbett (the local FBO), Harry Holland, John Nixon and Eric Robinson were the sources of much advice that influenced my way of beekeeping.
I also gleaned a lot from going to the CBKA Burton Manor weekends and conventions, particularly those hosted by Frank and Marjorie Griffiths where we had super barbecues. Advice from Jack Hunt about the use of substitute pollen patties still sticks in my mind, as well as listening to, and heeding, the likes of Derek Lockett.
How did your beekeeping develop?
As I got more adventurous, I needed out-apiaries. I luckily found a super out-apiary at Gayton through meeting the owner at a PTA meeting at Birkenhead School where both I and my son were educated. When I initially acquired the use of the site, there were horses in the field. The horse owner was not happy with running the gauntlet of the flight lines and eventually vacated the site: the field owner was not unhappy!! The field has now been allowed to grow wild flowers and a hay crop is taken after flowering.
Through my involvement with amateur dramatics I made the acquaintance of Mrs June Lancelyn Green and acquired the use of two other sites. One was at Poulton Lancelyn and the other adjacent to Clatterbridge Hospital. It was just across the road from a fruit farm and was mutually useful to me and the owner of the fruit farm. Sadly both sites had to be vacated, the latter because of change of ownership and the former because the newer cottage tenants objected to bees.
Having acquired and reconditioned a 17th Century cottage near Beddgelert, we took bees there for the heather. Later on we found a private site adjacent to the Llandegla moors which was much closer, more secure and gave better crops.
Another acquaintance in Heswall allowed me to keep hives in the grounds of their lovely house overlooking the Dee estuary and the Heswall Dales - now a Protected Natural Area. Accessing the hives was almost a mountaineering expedition, since they were on the edge of what was probably an old quarry. With sadness I vacated it in 1988 to avoid further aggravation of a knee injury. By 1987 I was running nearly 30 hives including nuclei and had the use of several temporary sites in Wirral.
I worked the Blakeman/Cheshire double brood-box system for many years, which was fine for static beekeeping, where the adding and taking away of the second brood-box is feasible. However it was not compatible with my migratory beekeeping. Now that I am back to static beekeeping, I still work the system, although the warmer winters, early Springs and late Autumns of the early part of this century make it difficult to know when to remove one brood box for sterilisation.
I find that the double brood-box system copes with prolific queens, which many of mine often are. The bees� desire to fill 12 to 13 frames with brood and stores is not compatible with a single National Brood Box and leads to swarms. I didn�t like �brood and a half� and, having started on WBC and Nationals, I was loathe to switch to other types such as Modified Commercials.
Apart from my initial purchase from Bill Burgess, and another colony a bit later from Roland Ayliffe, I do not buy in nuclei, queens or colonies. I used to find swarms would arrive in bait-hives at my apiaries and I bred my own queens, usually by artificial swarming.
Apart from a few purchases at Wirral Branch auctions early on, I made most of my own equipment. In so doing I made lightweight WBC lifts that fitted over National Hives and which were compatible with the old WBC lifts.
Because of this DIY attitude I still have several sheets of mesh waiting to be made into my own version of mesh floors. Doug Jones is always intrigued how I can I control varroa properly without mesh floors. I simply cull some drone comb at each inspection which tells me if the colony has mites. Interestingly I saw virtually no mites this last year and, touch wood, all 8 colonies had come through the winter at the end of January 2010.
I started using Apiguard in 1999 after comments made by Brian Palmer, the Kent BKA Delegate at the 1998 ADM.I also use BeeVital because it can be applied during the season if there is a serious mite problem and obviously use oxalic acid in the winter period. I have tried Exomite but find the bees don�t like it.
Apart from those interventions I try to let the bees get on with things in their own way.
One thing I have noticed of late is that Queens seem to have a shorter life span, don�t seem as prolific and for any that are replaced late in the year there is a great risk of the new queen failing during the winter. I now unite any colonies in Autumn that show signs of having a poor Queen.
After keeping bees for so long, you must have a store of tales to tell!
One year an old friend, Eric Murch (now retired but then one of Wirral�s leading Estate Agents) contacted me. He was selling a house in Bebington on behalf of an owner who had gone abroad. Eric said there were several hives in the garden complete with bees. He had got authority from the owner to remove and dispose of them so I went with another Wirral Branch beekeeper to inspect them, seal them up and move them away. Whilst inspecting them a new Queen came in after one of her mating flights with a drone still coupled. Did we have a camera handy? - NO !!.
Also in 1984 I was called to collect a swarm hanging from a tree outside the rear of Woolworths in Heswall. BT had a depot alongside but they didn�t have a ladder! Hence a mobile fire escape was called out from Birkenhead. A fireman who insisted on dressing as for a �nuclear incident� took me up and the swarm was successfully collected and hived. It was a text book operation but again no camera !
In 1984 having previously prepared the initial design and construction programme for the Liverpool International Garden Festival I was asked by Phil Deeley, one of the Landscape Architects, to organise a Bee Garden for the Festival.
So the Wirral beekeepers, in conjunction with the Liverpool beekeepers, organised and ran a Bee Garden at the Festival. We planted approximately 300 bee-friendly plants supplied by the Merseyside Development Corporation and had several different types of hives on display on our Stand. The hives had all been donated by equipment suppliers. We also had several National hives complete with bees as well as a large Lych Gate structure made by Harry Holland. This was to support two observation hives which we kept running throughout the several months of the Festival, a record duration. Afterwards the structure and observation hives were donated to the Croxteth Gardens. Ken McMorine, who initially stocked the hives, painted the drones white. It is probably apocryphal, but it was said that he did it by cooling them so they were drowsy and then warming them up in the microwave after painting!! (Please do not try this at home�Ed.)
Canadian beekeepers visiting our Stand were very interested in the WBC hives and took away plans. We gathered it was becoming very expensive to keep replacing colonies each Spring with package bees from California. Email was not around in those days to the extent it is now and we never knew if they were successful.
Beekeeping rarely goes as smoothly as the books would have us believe� have you had any disasters along the way?
Our first �disaster� was with our first colony. We were assured that as it had a new (1974) Queen it would not swarm the first year. The trouble was that she was very prolific and hence swarmed that July across the hedge into the garden of one of our neighbours. Yes, they were out enjoying tea on a sunny afternoon but fortunately the swarm landed on a shrub well away from where they were sitting. We collected the swarm in a wicker linen basket which was never the same again!! Believe it or not the same thing happened the next year and they went to the same shrub!! More placating jars of honey and still on friendly terms.
On another occasion we were taking a couple of colonies up to our cottage (I had acquired a trailer by then) and due to being diverted for tea I forgot to tighten the straps on one of the hives. It was dark when we left and when we approached the Two Mills junction on the A540 I realised that one hive was coming apart. My veil etc was in the boot so I pulled into a lay-by and make a quick dash for the veil etc taking care not to let any bees into the car. There Val, my son, my daughter and a couple of our siamese cats watched my antics with ill-controlled mirth!
I suppose the worst disaster was the 1988 AFB outbreak in Wirral In 1987 I had taken over an apiary belonging to Harry, an acquaintance of a friend. I was running nearly 24 hives excluding nuclei. The rape was hard work that year, but a good crop was taken, Harry's bees were reinforced, and I moved two spare colonies onto the site. It was also a good year for breeding, re-queening and splitting colonies, so I ignored my wife�s advice to reduce the number of colonies to cope with my business pressures.
Sure enough, nature took a hand. Between Christmas 1987 and New Year 1988 I opened up Harry�s original colony as it was obviously going down-hill. There were a few bees left and a few cells of sealed brood, a couple of which, thanks to lessons learnt at a Foul Brood recognition course at Luddington with Vince Cook, looked suspicious. Probing the suspect cells with a pine needle confirmed my suspicions.
Problems immediately arose because our local FBO's had not yet been re-engaged for the year. Anyhow Bob Oliver and Bill Corbett duly arrived, samples were taken, the hive sealed and AFB subsequently confirmed. A few days later on a dark and late winter's afternoon Bill and I dug a hole - typically sandstone was close to the surface - and the remains of the colony were burnt.
Barry, who was a member of the Wirral Branch, lived in Liverpool. With his permission Bob and I inspected his two colonies in Heswall, We found AFB in one colony and then checked the remaining colony - which was the parent colony of one Barry had taken home in the preceding Autumn to Liverpool - hence it had a new queen. We thought it was clear, but then we spotted a closed queen cell. We asked ourselves why it not been torn down - after all there was a new laying queen? Sure enough, when we opened the cell it was the only one visibly infected with AFB in that colony.
The subsequent hunt by Bob Oliver for other infected colonies and the source is another story. Suffice to say Bob reckoned it started at a semi-derelict apiary of an old beekeeper about a mile from my home apiary. Strangely in late 1987 I had been asked by a Rotarian colleague and a relative of the old beekeeper to have a look at his bees in the following Spring because the relative thought the old beekeeper was past looking after bees If he had asked me the preceding Spring maybe...!
When Bob Oliver inspected the apiary he found the colonies were riddled with AFB and hence likely to have had AFB in 1987 and possibly in 1986. Robbing by our bees and those from wild colonies in 1987 was thought to be the mode of transfer of the disease. Roland Ayliffe also found it in one of Bill Corbett�s hives at Burton which was about the limit in that direction.
Barry and I had all our stock of stored comb, supers and equipment etc sent for irradiation both in 1988 and 1989. Typically, 1987 was the year I had allowed my BDI to lapse!!
As our delegate to the BBKA, you have been involved in the discussions about beekeeping on a national level. How do you see the future of beekeeping?
Hopefully good. Although we must continue dealing with varroa with our present weapons I am sure the future will be varroa-tolerant bees and the use of natural or non-chemical treatments.
However I do worry about the long-term effect of some of the pesticides currently in use in agriculture, those yet to be developed and those we used for varroa control. I sometimes think they may be a greater risk than varroa.
I still remember the DDT disaster: its effects were long term and are still with us. It was going to cure everything caused by nasty insects such as malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Personally I think the greatest risk may be from systemic insecticides, particularly those of the neonicotinoid group. Misuse of similar seed dressings has already caused disaster in France and Germany, and unless such insecticides have a 12 month self-destruct mechanism I think they will just build up in the soil and ground water each time they are used.
Some treated plants exude extra floral nectar, creating risks highlighted by Buglife, whose petition I signed. Whilst the amounts of pesticide contained in such nectars are very small they will build up in the wax the bees produce. Although bees will not necessarily be killed, what is the effect on the fertility of our queens and drones?
I know Bee Farmers can easily import queens and possibly are more concerned with maintaining their honey production than caring about such matters. What happens when one day their source of queens has disappeared?
As a long-standing member of the Cheshire Beekeepers� committee, how well-equipped do you think the CBKA is for the challenges to come?
Having served on the Wirral Branch and CBKA committees for many years I think the strength of any organisation lies in such committees, sub-committees and officers.
Committee membership must be changed from time to time, new ideas explored and taken on board. Otherwise the organisation becomes stale and eventually dies. During the time I was CBKA ADM Delegate I witnessed many changes which stopped the BBKA becoming stale and moribund. Indeed without such changes I doubt that the BBKA would have been able to raise the awareness of beekeeping both in the view of the public and the Government. In a similar manner the Stoneleigh Spring Convention has been revitalised and is a huge success.
We have currently agreed that more of the subscriptions are fed back to the Branches but time will tell how much further we can move in that direction.
I sincerely hope there will not be any splintering in the CBKA such as been seen in other Associations where Branches become small Associations. Whilst there may be cogent reasons for some of those changes in recent years it all adds to the cost of running the BBKA and the smaller Association has less voice in the BBKA when it comes to a card vote.
I think that, provided we continue in such a manner, our future is bright. The addition of a Convention to the AGM which will be organised by each Branch on a rotating basis is innovative and a good example of how we should go forward.
I still remember with affection the annual Burton Manor weekend organised by CBKA when Jean and John Van Suchtelen were Secretary and Vice Chairman respectively. I was sorry when the weekend event was dropped as I learnt a lot at the lectures and one got to know many other beekeepers, especially over a glass or two of home-brew.
Michael Minter was talking to Pete Sutcliffe