Special Honeybees

As with so much of our wildlife, Ardnamurchan's local honey bees are very special. They are some of the few bee populations in the UK which are free of the varroa mite, a parasite which so weakens its hosts that the colony often dies, usually in late autumn.

I didn't realise how fortunate we were until I read an article in the June issue of our local monthly newspaper De tha Dol? Anyone visiting Ardnamurchan should read this gem of a paper as it's full of interesting news - and you can always tell how good a paper is from the way the local politicians queue up to get their monthly piece into it.

The article was by Kate Atchley who lives at Mingarry, the other side of Acharacle. She had almost caused a disaster by bringing in new, possibly contaminated hives from Edinburgh, so wrote to warn other local bee-keepers against making a similar mistake.

It's good to find our garden flowers a mass of honeybees this summer. Their current favourite is ceanothus, which is one of the plants which, after the unusually cold winter and dry early summer we've just experienced, has thrived. These particular bees probably come from the hive in Trevor Potts' campsite two hundred yards down the road, a hive which - I have personal experience of this - produces excellent honey.

Not all the bees in the village managed to survive the winter. A colony on the Old Golf Course which was thriving in early April was caught by a sudden cold snap and died. And the varroa mite and changes in weather aren't the bees' only adversaries....