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Anyone with interesting current bee news or bee courses in the UK for 2012 should email rodney.earp@gmail.com  also photos and jpgs appreciated.

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FBBKA Newsletters South Chilterns

New beekeepers should read the FBBKA Newsletters as there are many hints in there what you might do practically this month.

The excellent Federation of Berkshire Beekeepers Association Newsletter for May and June 2012 is now available for all beginner and experienced  apiarist to read in pdf form. This is automatically emailed out to all Apis-UK subscribers as Apis -UK is now longer available.

We are endebted to Ron Cocker who compiles the newsletter.

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 FBBKA Newsletters South Chilterns

(click the above to see the newsletters)

The Federation of Berkshire Beekeepers Association and the  South Chilterns Beekeepers Association  excellent  newsletter replaces the former Apis-UK publication in PDF format and will be sent out to all Apis-Notifications in future monthly (Apis- UK published every 3 months).

The Apis-UK story.

The last Apis- UK to be published was Issue number 57 dated October 2008.

This was a superb piece of pan bee journalism by two professor's Ron Atkinson (Irish News) and Jim Primus (American Research Vanderbilt University USA) together with Pam Hunter (UK News) they collated the latest bee articles and sent them to the editor in New Zealand David Cramp.

Apis UK was now sent back to England to an html (hyper text mark up language) converter Stephen Loughborough who made the Apis-UK viewable on the Internet for all beekeepers who looked forward to getting the prompting email to open the latest Apis-UK. The good old days.

As webmaster Rod Earp loaded Apis UK up to the beedata.com website.

No one set rigid dead lines but the Apis-UK appeared around every quarter and up to October 2008 everything worked fine.

What went wrong? No one ever told me as webmaster but I guessed that somewhere down the collating and publishing line family commitments and time got in the way. Colossal amounts of time was needed by all participating in making Apis-UK but especially for Steven Loughborough who converted Apis from Word and photos to html- Apis owed him and everyone else  on the team for the production of Apis-UK. Now no more.

There is one more important person Jeremy Burbridge (proprietor of Northern Bee Books) who pays the subscription for beedata.com yearly. Without this you would not have a beedata.com nor would you get free beedata, information or publications were it not for Jeremy.

Comments to beedata.com webmaster rodney.earp@gmail.com who is trying to provide new young  and mature beekeepers with new fresh material. This is my own personal email and Rod looks at email daily.

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Do you remember Eric Tourneret Paris Photojournalist and commissioned phototographer produces stories for publications: Paris match, newton, Quo, Geo, Focus and Grand Reportage http://sylla.sp.free.fr/?

Well there's a 1 year old Stingless Bee Video from him you can see ( you need a South American drink to relax to this video and you may want want to move with the music)

click http://vimeo.com/17648339

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On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Louis Rummer-Downing <louisrummer@googlemail.com> wrote:
 

Hello,
          My name is Louis Rummer-Downing, I am a wildlife photographer and have been photographing and writing about honeybees for the past 12 months. I have just been funded to work with a Cornish beekeeper who is breeding Varroa mite resistance into his bees. The work he does is very interesting and my project lasts for 5 weeks, so I aim to film this behaviour, but also record other aspects to his job (he is a full time beekeeper), including the Heather honey flow, from start to finish, and also a diary of events for that 5 weeks. My work can be viewed on my blog www.louisrd.blogspot.com and this will be updated constantly with photography and notes about honeybees and my project. I hope you enjoy the work, please get in contact about anything, I would like to get involved with any project or ideas. I am available for any work.

Yours Sincerely

Louis Rummer-Downing

Based in Gloucestershire, Southwest England
Tel. 07817139662/ 01453 546921
Email: louisrummer@gmail.com
Blog: www.louisrd.blogspot.com

 

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Dear John,
Further to our telephone conversation here below is the piece from “Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) “ on Bees, Bats & Frogs dying in droves, and pesticides are implicated.
Best Wishes
David

Bees, bats & frogs dying off in droves, pesticides implicated
Five great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in the past 439 million years, each wiping out between half and 95% of planetary life; the most recent extinction event was the killing off of dinosaurs. Today we're living through the sixth great extinction event - a fact of which much of the public remains unaware. According to a poll by the American Museum of Natural History, seven in ten biologists believe that mass extinction poses an even greater threat to humanity than the global warming which contributes to it. It takes 10 million years to recover from the biodiversity loss of these mass die-offs.
Whether or not they are placing their work in this longer-view context, scientists are drawing more and more links between pesticide use and certain clusters of wildlife die-offs. "For decades," Sonia Shah reports in Yale's Environment 360, "toxicologists have accrued a range of evidence showing that low-level pesticide exposure impairs immune function in wildlife, and have correlated this immune damage to outbreaks of disease." Amphibians were the first to start dying off - in 1998 scientists identified the cause as a type of fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Carlos Davidson, a biologist at San Francisco State University, has studied insecticide use in the San Joaquin Valley that shows a strong correlation between pesticides drifting into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and declining amphibian populations. A few years’ later America's honeybees started dying - 35% of their population has been decimated since 2006. Many scientists have begun drawing links between the dramatic bee die-offs, labeled Colony Collapse Disorder, and a group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.
Bats are the most recent victims: in 2006 the first cave floors were found covered with dead bats in the Northeast. White Nose Syndrome, the fungus-related disease that killed them, has killed at least 1 million bats since then. As with the fungus that's killing amphibians, some scientists think that that bats are more susceptible to the fungus because their immune systems may be weakened by pesticide exposure. Bats are particularly vulnerable because even low levels of pesticides can accumulate over of their long life spans. While there might be "too many different pesticides, lurking in too many complex, poorly understood habitats to build definitively damning indictments," the growing body of evidence points increasingly towards pesticides - even at so-called "safe levels" - as the cause of these and other problems for wildlife.
shareMORE Center for Biological Diversity | Digg This
GMOs cause organ failure in mammals
A ground-breaking study in the International Journal of Biological Studies links three common varieties of Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) corn to liver and kidney toxicity and clearly illustrates the need for independent research on GMOs' health effects. As noted by Scientific American and a host of other observers, agricultural biotechnology firms consistently suppress or render impossible independent scientific studies by hiding behind patent law. This study -- conducted by French university scientists -- is a meta-analysis of studies conducted by Monsanto and another biotech firm, which comes to a different conclusion and calls into question the adequacy of Monsanto's research methodology. Specifically, this study looks at sex-differentiated effects and non-linear dose response curves whereas Monsanto did not. Monsanto has issued a response to the study, to which one of the lead authors, Gilles-Eric Séralini in turn responded, "Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose." Originally, published in mid-December, the study has recently garnered coverage in Huffington Post, Grist and Twilight Earth, among other outlets.
Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) 49 Powell St., Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
Phone: (415) 981-1771 Fax: (415) 981-1991 Email: panna@panna.org

Web: http://www.panna.org

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Look at these two  excellent world class bee websites when you have 5 minutes in the office and the boss isn't looking:

Eric Tourneret Paris Photojournalist and commissioned phototographer produces stories for publications: Paris match, newton, Quo, Geo, Focus and Grand Reportage http://sylla.sp.free.fr/

The second brilliant website is pbs it has lot on CCD and a nature video section check out the bee video 2.41 minutes viewing time.  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bees/impact.html

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