Workshop: Record-keeping and Selecting Breeding Queens

We have a new workshop on record-keeping and selecting breeding queens coming up on the 21st of February.

This workshop will be of interest to all of us as it focuses on record-keeping and the selection of breeding queens.  The Workshop speaker will be Michael Maunsell.
Members only. No Fee.

Do you keep records of the status of your hives? If you don’t, you should. Do you know what you should record and how and why? You should.  This workshop will equip you with the knowledge you need to keep a detailed record of your hives’ status and your activities at each one for easy reference when things go wrong or for comparison from season to season and hive to hive.

We may not all be in the business of supplying queens, but we will all need to produce some queens at some stage in our beekeeping careers.  Therefore it is necessary for us to know the best way of going about this and queen selection is a major part of the process.

Michael Maunsell is a retired mathematics and physics teacher. He began beekeeping in the early 1970s when he was approached by a local farmer to rescue bees from a dangerous hollow tree that overhung the road between his house and his neighbours land. There followed a short intense period of study of beekeeping and carpentry to make a suitable home for his new tenants.

With a background in science, he set about experimenting with his new charges. He learned a great deal of his beekeeping from his involvement with the Galtee Bee Breeding Group. His beekeeping philosophy is quite simple – start with your own local bees, use natural selection (survival of the fittest, this has brought them to where they are) then progress with artificial selection, using comprehensive colony records.