In beekeeping, there are a lot of people who are keen to give advice, whether verbally
or the written word. There are a lot of myths and misinformation, often “cut and pasted”
from other sources, which may simply be copying someone else’s mistake, who copied
someone else’s mistake and so on. The same thing is then seen in different places and
because it’s in print it’s believed to be correct, but is it? Inexperienced beekeepers may
have difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff, but the more experienced a beekeeper
becomes, the more they realise that some of what they have been told, sometimes quite
forcibly, may be unreliable or inappropriate for them. This presentation highlights a few
topics that may not always be as we are told. It doesn’t rubbish the “standard
information”, but gives experiences that have been acquired during over half a century of
practical beekeeping.
Roger Patterson
Roger is a practical beekeeper who started keeping bees in his native West Sussex in 1963. He has learnt a lot by observing bees and beekeepers in a wide variety of locations, which has helped him to develop his simple management system and to question what he is told.
Roger has learnt a lot from bees, that he passes on to others as a prolific speaker, demonstrator and writer with five books published. “Live @ the Hive” features him being live streamed inspecting
colonies and giving tips from his home apiary. He has been a demonstrator at the Wisborough Green BKA teaching apiary since the early 1970s and is currently the Apiary Manager, where there are normally over 30 colonies for tuition. For about 15 years he had 130 colonies of his own, but is now down to around 25. He owns and runs the Dave Cushman website www.dave-cushma...