LA secretaries and Council meeting

[gavin]

Anyone going tomorrow? Should be fun. There is one controversial motion for the Council meeting to get the adrenaline flowing, a talk on hive monitors, and several interesting topics for the Local association secretaries meeting in the morning.

G.

[EmsE]

I'm going along and looking forward to it, not sure what to expect though.

[kevboab]

Was hoping to go however it clashes with a litter of pups i have to microchip. :-(

[Jimbo]

I am going with Mike and Ben B. Had a late night last night so it better be interesting or I will need a lot of coffee to get me through the day!

[gavin]

LOL! Never heard that excuse before - microchipping puppies.

Jimbo is probably on the way already, snoozing on Ben's shoulder in the back of the car. Ems, these meetings can challenge the sleep-deprived, but there are s few things to hold the attention. See you later I hope.

G.

[Trog]

Lovely to meet EmsE and Jimbo for the first time. Sorry I didn't get a chance to chat, Gavin, but hope you caught my friendly smile in your direction! I thought it was an excellent pair of meetings, though I'm pretty hoarse now from all the chatting! (And it'll be Monday evening before I see my pretty horse ...!)

[Jimbo]

One of the better meetings I have attended. I was particularly interested in Huw Evans talk on the hive monitors that records the sounds. Huw mentioned that they have discovered a difference in sounds from the different subspecies of bees. He did not show any results but I did ask if the Italian bees that the work was done on spoke with an Italian accent and native dark bees spoke with a british accent. Do you think than hybrid bees may be bi-lingual? Perhaps the native bees may have local accents e.g a Glasgow accent or a Dundee accent. The monitoring of bee hive sounds could be compared to morphometry. Anybody got a spare few hundred thousand pounds for a wee research project?

[kevboab]

Sounds like i missed a good day then. You tell me what you want chipped Gavin and i shall gladly fire a needle into the back of its neck !!!
:-)

[Jimbo]

After hearing the sounds the queens and workers make I wonder if we can respond and speak back to them. I can't find my kazoo but tissue paper and comb might work. What would you want to say to them though?

[gavin]

Dear Dr Doolittle

Don't tell me that you haven't surreptitiously tried the queen piping sound in one of your mating apiaries just to see what happened? The Pied Piper and his rats/children have nothing on the carnage to be seen when a bunch of Apideas all explode into life.

Taking a cue from some comments yesterday I'm now working on a patented method (Monsanto will pay my costs, I'm sure) to empty all Apideas of the non-Amm bees whilst leaving the pure queens behind for successful mating.

There was one thing missing from the talk yesterday. I presume that the whole idea of the hive monitor thing is so that some bright spark like Jimbo can actually talk to them and ask them whether supping from neonic-tainted crops makes them feel dizzy?

Gavin

PS Don't believe everything you read on the internet, and this is the internet after all.

PPS Kev - Don't tempt me!