New Blackmore Vale, July 23, 2021
Letters
Stuck in the middle with poo: Vaunted Your edition No. 20 carried a press release from Somerset Waste Partnership letting the people of South Somerset know rubbish bins would be picked up 3 weekly instead of fortnightly. We have indoor cats who generate about 60 litres of used litter per week – recycling will not take this and neither will the green bin collections. Obviously this would completely fill a 180l bin every 3 weeks leaving no room at all for any other rubbish. Asking for extra capacity led to the reply “We cannot accommodate for pets when allocating container capacity.” Readers with pets may like to know that the complicated and expensive Recycle More system will leave them stuck in the middle with poo (uncollected). R.H. Joyce South Cheriton n Having viewed the illustration (of plans for Sherborne House) printed in your June 11 edition one has to remark as to why does this proposal look almost identical to the south elevation of the Waitrose sited a short distance opposite? I guess using your imagination is such a struggle sometimes! Phil Burchell n I read Mr. Summers’ letter in the July 9 NBV with some interest. I fear your strap-line that commercial beekeeping was to blame for loss of healthy swarms was misleading. The point Mr. Summers was trying to make was that queens were increasingly not swarming but dying prematurely leading to colony extinction. Mr Summers attributes this to commercial beekeepers relying on a narrow range of artificially mated queens and thereby decreasing the general genetic gene pool of the bee population. Unfortunately he does not supply any evidence in support this supposition. Increased queen 34
Cartoon by Lyndon Wall justsocaricatures .co.uk
failure might equally be attributable to a number of causes including virus and other infections carried by varroa mites, wax moth infestations, various agricultural practices, or even bee-keeper error. A commercial bee-keeper running say 300 hives and making a fairly dilatory 6 hive brood nest inspections a year, will at the end of the year have carried out some 1,800 brood inspections. On the other hand a hobbyist bee-keeper with say 5 hives who inspects roughly every week or so between mid March and mid August will make some 100 inspections in a year. It would take the hobbyist 18 years to gain the experience a commercial bee-keeper gets in a year. If you read the books queen rearing by natural (nonartificial insemination) techniques is fairly painstaking but not unduly complicated. The
problems arise firstly with assuring adequate mating (many queens appear to mate successfully but later turn out to have been inadequately mated or have an inadequate stock of fertilised eggs), and then with preparing colonies to be requeened to accept their new leader. This requires a certain amount of experience. Though I would not necessarily doubt that queens appear to be failing more often (it concurs with my more limited anecdotal experience – I am now retired) I would hesitate to lay the blame at the door of imported artificially inseminated queens introduced by commercial beekeepers. I would imagine the population of hives owned by amateur bee-keepers vastly outnumbers the ever decreasing number of commercial beekeepers. Of course amateur bee-keepers also purchase
artificially inseminated queens, some of which survive, but I think it a bit much to blame this for a major deflection of the gene pool. Most serious beekeepers are aware of the phenomenon of reversion to the mean. The aim is not to breed for individual exceptional performance but to establish lines of bees where the mean yield per hive is raised and you end up with more honey. Raising mean hive performance involves many variables including adaptability to local climatic, zoological, and botanic conditions. Experienced beefarmers will combine breeding from their own most successful lines, exchanging lines with other successful colleagues, and buying in selected stock from overseas, but on the whole they will not rely on a single source. So before we jump to conclusions and set up yet another British Standard Code of Practice to be policed by more officials could Mr Summers please provide some statistical evidence to support his claim. John Davies, Haygrove Honey Farm, Twyford n Dorset Council wants to update its parking charges. I hope that will include a stop to their harassment of OAPs and Blue Badge holders. Salisbury and Warminster have free parking ALL DAY for Blue Badge holders. Shaftesbury Town Council is particularly bad in this respect. Boots and The High Street is now virtually out of bounds for older people. Access now is only through long distances, Bell St or Angel Square, slopes and steps, if you can find a space, both are bad for my mitral regurgitation and atrial fibrillation. Shaftesbury shops and High Street need all year round visitors, not just coaches and tourists on coffee breaks. Name and address supplied
