Third-Time Guest Speaker Wally Shaw will speak to the club in a Zoom presentation titled Both Sides Now: Proactive, and Reactive Swarm Prevention Everyone Should Know. You’ll hear observations on swarm-trigger criteria,  time tested approaches to swarm prevention, and recipes for success. The swarm-organizer bees in the hive want to facilitate reproduction; the beekeeper’s agenda is to prevent swarming out into the neighborhood.

Ex-research ecologists Shaw (a graduate of Bangor University in North Wales, and MSc from University of New Brunswick Canada), and spouse Jenny (director of Bee-Craft magazine) took up beekeeping together 36 years ago to insure pollination of their newly planted orchard. Their fascination with bees drove their expansion to 70 hives in six apiaries as a virtual second career. Honey income finances the obsession. Except for their first colony, acquired from a local beekeeper, all colonies and queens came from splitting, queen breeding, and swarm-catching on Anglesey which is somewhat isolated from the rest of Wales.