Dear friends

It has been a super busy spell at Bees for Development. In March we organised the Symposium at Reading University described opposite. It was a great chance to celebrate 25 years of promoting the value of beekeeping for rural livelihoods, and the tremendous increase we have witnessed in awareness of the value of bees and beekeeping. In the centre pages we give you a glimpse of some of our current work and describe how we endeavour to measure the impact of our achievements.

In May we organised a one-day Bee Festival here in Monmouth to celebrate World Bee Awareness Day - as far as we know, the only such event held in the UK. The very next day we were with our fabulous display at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show - this is a world-famous annual event in London, always attended on the first day by the Queen and her royal family. The Chelsea Flower Show is famous for the perfection of the exhibits, and we could not have been there if not for the loyal family of E H Thorne Ltd, who organised this for us. Our display showed the powerful service that bees provide as they pollinate three quarters of the world’s food crops. We were delighted to be awarded a Silver Medal. And very happy to have the chance to tell thousands of people about the value of bees and beekeeping and to let them see simple, effective and beautiful bee hives from Africa and Asia.

This month we have been delighted to welcome Dr Leo Sharashkin here to run courses on beekeeping in horizontal frame hives - you can read more about him and the beekeeping he practices in the Ozark forest of Missouri, USA, on pages 13- 15. This beekeeping can be described as natural, i.e. the bees are never fed on sugar, they are not subject to treatments with any chemicals, and the bees are allowed to live with little interference. Many readers of this Journal, perhaps the majority of you, are beekeeping in this way: do get in touch and tell us about your bees and beekeeping - we love to hear from you!

Here in the UK bees used to be kept in baskets known as skeps, though few British beekeepers nowadays know the skills to keep bees this way. However Chris Park is a great expert on all aspects of skep making and keeping bees in them - he visited us this week and we were delighted to host what may have been this century’s first course on skep beekeeping! Skep beekeepers had many skills that have almost been forgotten - though not entirely - Chris is a great exponent of the craft and a new generation of beekeepers are interested to learn about this simple and highly natural way to keep bees.

Nicola Bradbear Director, Bees for Development