Bee Basic Exam

I took the BBKA basic exam this week. The person examining me was Celia Davis the president of the Warwickshire beekeepers association, chairperson of the Solihull branch and author of a couple of Bee books. I figure trying to show someone with that level of expertise the basics is going to be difficult as they must see lots of people and the level of expectation is going to be high.

I get the results in two weeks, the test is divided into practical parts and theoretical parts. I think I did OK, I may have made a couple of mistakes and could have had more knowledge of diseases. I had done my homework and studied and I know the principles etc, and I have a couple of years of experience so I should be alright.

Will keep you posted on the results. If I don't pass now I can take the exam again next year.


The orchard is fine examined the trees and the fruits, everything looks fine, I reckon some of the pear trees have rust leaf and I plan on doing some research on the subject over the next couple of days. I have seen rust leaf before on pear trees else where and in most cases it was just left as treatment may be expensive or labour intensive.

I have had more bird damage to some of the apples and as the orchard is still young, I guess its expected. Once the orchard has been established longer and I have more fruit, I am hoping that the percentage of fruit damaged is less. At present I can go around each tree and pick off damaged fruit. I then give it to my son who feeds it to next doors horses. They are loving the apples. In a couple of weeks the gages and the plums are going to be ready.

It will then be time to enjoy apple and plum crumble.

We have Honey

I have extracted my first super this week. Now I have jars of honey some of which I will be giving away. I have had several people request honey, ever since I started bee keeping people are always requesting honey. I have not taken any orders as I cannot confirm that I can meet the orders yet, but may in the future.I have about 15/20 jars at the moment and most of this will be given to friends and family.

It took a while to extract, I removed the super on Saturday and extracted on Saturday afternoon and returned the supper with the wet frames so that the bees could clear it up.

I then left the honey in the extractor until Monday evening; when I bottled it. As you may expect it was sticky work. It's was nice to see the finished product after all this time. My wife is going to make a honey cake this coming weekend. I will invest in an extractor next year. This year I used the association extractor.

Other news

The farmer next to me and noticed that we have creeping thistle he has sprayed his pasture land for the weed when he discovered it. Another farmer with a quad bike came with a tank on the back and a sprayer. I obviously don't want to spray so I have had to read several documents from the Organic Gardening website, which lists many government documents and scientific papers on the subject. I have read a couple, some very detailed. They all seem to recommend the same thing. Cut the grass before flowering and then put down additional seed, and keep this up for 3 years.

So on Sunday last week my brother and I cut the grass down to about 2 inches and will doing the same on Saturday, but slightly shorter.

Its hard work, we don't normally cut that much grass at one time. I will also be ordering some meadow flower seeds and red/white clover seeds to throw out this weekend prior to the next cut.

Otherwise all is well, the trees are doing ok, the Laxton Superb apples are doing great, as are other varieties but the Laxton Superb looks like a bumper crop. I managed to eat a couple of cherries before they were all taken by birds, lots of plums in trees, but not a single pear. I can see that the red berries are ready. All in all a small but nice harvest for year two.