Looking Up….. With the yellow-legged ‘Asian’ hornet season now at a close, there’s much to ponder on. The nest tally for 2024 stands at 24 - compare that to last year’s total of 72 nests and you’d be forgiven for thinking we’ve got off lightly.  No doubt the challenging weather during the spring and early summer played a part in the lower numbers. Perhaps the mammoth efforts of the National Bee Unit, BBKA members and AHT Teams, and the wider public, are now starting to pay off in the fight to prevent this invasive predator from becoming established. Or have some nests been missed, despite those efforts and increased public awareness?    Clearly a number of variables could be at play here. But whatever the reality, there’s a danger that the perception this is somehow over already might start to take hold, in the absence of an increase on last year’s tally. So how to keep a winged intruder most associated with the b...

The BBKA office will be closed from Tuesday 24th December 2024 until Wednesday 1st January 2025 inclusive. Any orders placed via our website shop after 12.00 noon on Monday 23rd December will be processed and posted when we return on Thursday 2nd January 2025.

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BBKA Spring Convention 2024 Participant Feedback This year’s Spring Convention at Harper Adams University in Shropshire (12-14 April 2024) saw an increase in participation from 2022 and 2023 levels, to numbers similar to pre-Covid in 2018 / 2019. Furthermore, compared with these pre-Covid years there were slightly more attending the full Convention (lectures, workshops and seminars, plus bee-related retail therapy at the trade show) than attending just the trade show. The feedback from the event has been extremely positive, and it allows us to learn a little more about the attendees so that we can build on the successes of the year and try to address any aspects that were less well received.  The aim was to offer a feedback questionnaire to everyone attending the event – this year we had 139 completed questionnaires returned. These included feedback on all aspects of the meeting, some from multiple choice options and some from free-text input. Most of the completed q...