Letters

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

New Blackmore Vale, July 23, 2021 Letters recycling system leaves us in the doo-doo

n Abbrieviated copy of letter sent to Dorset Council: You appear to be rolling out a new and malevolent parking payment system. An example is in the Market Square in Blandford and involves payment via a smart phone. This is diabolical and I suggest you seriously rethink this. Put yourself in the position of a person with mobility issues but not a Blue Badge holder, who needs to get to a chemist in Blandford. Then think about how your ‘new’ system is serving your employers (the residents of Dorset). Please consider reverting to the acceptance of cash payments. I realise there is an income benefit for you but you can you confirm that all the present income goes into the maintenance of machines and collection of payments. The BVM article in the July 9 edition states that you wish to ‘standardise car park prices across the council area’. WHY? Your proposals guarantee that local residents and business people WILL be’out of pocket. When the various districts of Dorset were ‘consolidated’ we were told it was to reduce costs. That was patently untrue. No effort has been made to reduce costs. Ever since then we have been facing higher and higher charges for less and less services. Buses, particularly rural routes, refuse collection, road maintenance, cleaning, verge cutting for safe sight lines. Your ‘out-sourcing’ has been a joke, with reductions in service, no management by yourselves and no accountability, either of council managers or their subcontractors. In the real world, heads would have rolled long ago. I don’t expect any thought will be given to this email, but perhaps I’ll notice some minor changes to what you are doing? John Carter. Iwerne Minster n As a resident of Bridge Close Gillingham, we would appreciate any cheaper car park space plus bigger, to stop the people who so called walk to the station from parking opposite our driveways and going off for a day, weekend or even a week’s holiday. They have no thought for when we need emergency services etc, or visitors, plus difficulty in entering and exiting our own drives. Forget the flora and fauna and think of the people who are really inconvenienced. Fed up resident Isabelle Russell

Thank you all for the pearls

Many readers will recall that late last year I launched an appeal for people to send me their loose pearls, so I could create necklaces to auction, and raise funds for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. Each donation of a pearl represents a life lost, just as had happened a hundred years ago in 1921, when the Poppy became the symbol of Remembrance. The response was overwhelming and the pearls poured in, with many arriving along with touching messages and stories. By the closing date of December 2020, I began to sort and thread them, with the expertise of jewellers, Allum & Sidaway. A few weeks ago I began to make up some of the beautiful pearl necklaces, which will be auctioned this year –coinciding with the centenary of The Poppy. And who knows, you may be lucky and buy one for yourself, or for someone special. There couldn’t be necklaces with more special meanings! It was promised that any pearls which couldn’t be threaded into necklaces, would be given to charity, but plans are afoot to produce a wonderful piece of wall art by a very talented local artist. The reason I wanted a piece to appear in the New Blackmore Vale Magazine, is to reassure everyone who so kindly donated pearls, that they are safe and are being sympathetically remade. Anne Kings Gillingham

n I am writing to express my dismay at the attitude of staff in Blandford Post Office. There are few post offices that are able to process applications for a renewal of driving licences so we dutifully travelled to Blandford in order to do this. I produced my letter from DVLA and a wallet containing my card driving licence and in there was my old paper one, which is obsolete and I was keeping as a part of changing history to keep much as I have all my life an old bus ticket from my school days, my first passport with its corner cut off etc etc. The young lady serving me saw it in my wallet and started to remove it where by I expressed my wish to keep it for keeping sake. The lady removed it and refused to give it back. I could not have felt more violated than if I had been robbed in the street. I am appalled and upset she was able to do this. I shall not be returning. Mrs Siwan Roberts

n I was heartbroken to read of the plight of this poor family of hedgehogs in the last issue of your magazine. Surely by now with all of the awareness everywhere about hedgehogs, using any machinery to cut grass should be thought through? Are people stupid, oblivious or don’t they care? It’s so avoidable by just checking first. Use your eyes and a stick to gently check for these creatures which have a hard enough time as it is without having their lives obliterated by man. Another example of man’s destruction of the planet. Mrs Francis, Blandford

n I am a little sceptical about the supposed savings in bin collections described in the NBV of July 9. It is hard to understand how moving my bin collection from Wednesday to Friday saves any money, and even harder to understand how sending a separate vehicle round for the food waste provides a saving. I asked the bin collectors about this, and they shrugged their shoulders. Further, in a year when our rates have risen 5%, one wonders how much the new waste collection vehicles cost, and what happened to the old ones. These comments raise serious questions, which BMV might like to pursue, but I doubt the council will answer them. John S. Elce Glanvilles Wootton