Dear friends

Our cover picture shows an oil painting by artist Kate Lynch, depicting British skep maker Diana Robertson. One hundred years ago, most honey bees in the UK were kept in skeps, the British style of basket hive, and the skills to make these baskets were commonplace. Today in the UK, just a very few people like Diana still have the skills to make these skeps. Beekeepers using skeps utilised bees in a way that is fundamentally different from current day British beekeeping: they focused on the local honey bee population, rather than each individual colony. We can say that beekeeping in those days was more extensive compared with current day beekeeping in frame hives - that tends towards intensive beekeeping, highly directed towards gaining maximum honey production from each colony. Beekeeping is still practised in an extensive way in many places around the world, and in such regions (notably sub-Saharan Africa) honey bee populations live naturally and remain markedly healthy. We discuss this further on pages 3 to 5. It is interesting to consider what styles of beekeeping will be the norm one hundred years from now.

BfD on Wikipedia

Bees for Development featured on the front page of Wikipedia in the ‘Did you know’ section on 30 May as part of the launch of Monmouthpedia. Monmouth, the town in Wales where we are based, became linked with Wikipedia to be the world’s first Wikipedia town. This generated over 2,000 views of our Wikipedia page on the day. Wikipedia is a new avenue for BfD to raise awareness of the great benefits provided by sustainable beekeeping.

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/MonmouthpediA

Nguno Chugga works with the Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service - see page 10

PHOTO © Nguno Chugga