Letters

THE BEST HIVE

I write challenging an article and a very misleading photograph, which was published in B&D 59, and promotes modern methods of I am a beekeeper of 15 years’ experience and I am very involved in helping train our local communal farmers in beekeeping.

The biggest challenge we are facing is to persuade farmers to change from the traditional log or bark hive made from slow growing indigenous trees to modern top-bar hives made from fast growing pine plantation timber. The main reasons are to stop deforestation and also to be ready to notice or deal with any pests or diseases for example Varroa mites, which are already in South Africa.

Your photograph shows a very big hollow tree trunk and obviously a very big old indigenous tree was cut to make that part of the hive. The top-bars are a very noble idea, but the base part is exactly the opposite of everything we are trying very hard to introduce.

What I am writing about is not some extract from another magazine, but what I deal with in my day-to-day duties. I help with training Zimbabwean communal farmers in basic beekeeping skills.

I am very involved in training sessions and sometimes | also go and visit the various projects around the country working with, for example Forestry Commission Extension Officers and Project Co-ordinators on beekeeping workshops. I personally believe in empowering my fellow country folk by modern methods and financial assistance, but feel very strongly opposed to the idea of telling them the wrong ideas.

Lazarus Moyd, Borrowdale, Zimbabwe

DESTRUCTIVE HONEY EXTRACTION

A lot of people consume honey in Nigeria, either as a food or as a medicine. But to obtain the honey is a problem. There is a high demand and this is forcing many people, particularly farmers, into the business of hunting bees. The common method of obtaining the honey is working at night using fire to remove the bees and obtain the honey. The colonies of bees are so badly burnt that none of them are left alive.

The unfortunate aspect is that you cannot get honey all year round in Nigeria: this is because bees produce more honey during the hot season from February to March. Fortunately, now that more people have started keeping bees the destructive extraction is gradually dying out as the majority of people see it as a system that is not worth keeping.

Kparev Emmanuel Terseer, Abuja, Nigeria

GMO DEBATE

A ever, I enjoyed reading B&D 59, and particularly took note of the continuing debate on GMO's. I agree with many of the sentiments of Joe Rowland's article (B&D 59 page 3) on GMO's, but wonder whether there is another explanation for the origin of tracyeliie-resistant strain(s) of American foulbrood (AFB) that have arisen in Argentina and the USA.

Time and again it has been shown that pest organisms often develop reduced susceptibility to chemicals that are used to control them; this is true of a wide range of pest organisms, for example microorganisms, weed plants or insects. The reduced susceptibility of mosquitoes to commonly used pesticides in many parts of the world is a good casein point. Given that beekeepers in the USA apply tetracycline prophylactically to their colonies, it is not surprising that AFB has evolved resistance to this antibiotic. Do Argentina's beekeepers follow the same practices as US beekeepers?

The possibility of gene transfer from a GM crop to the causative bacterium of AFB might exist, as Joe Rowlands points out in his article, but there is as yet, as far as I am aware, no confirmation for it. The report cited by Rowlands (point 3) was a bit of mis-information and media hype which the University of Jena immediately clarified in a public statement in June 2000 — but in which the media seemed little interested.

Other methods that do not rely solely on the application of antibiotics have had great success in reducing the incidence of AFB in some European countries. They might help reduce the chances of AFB evolving tetracycline-resistance elsewhere in the world, and would mean that beekeepers are not dependent on what, for some, are expensive chemicals that are difficult to find in the marketplace

Yours interestedly

Robert Paxton, Entwicklungsphysiologie Zoologisches Institut der Universitat Tuebingen, Germany