If you wish to watch Roger Patterson at work, you can join him this morning at Shenharra at 9am.
There is a travelling programme arranged and if you wish to join us during the day, please feel free to ring me on 499511.
Whether you – like me – are new to this fascinating hobby, or an old-hand there should be something to learn watching Roger at work and listening to him as he goes about his trade.
On Friday, we visited two topbar hives in the Castletown – those belonging to your scribe – 
a rural apiary outside Peel, 
a lovely WBC hive on the west coast, 
closed up for a handful of years in which a cast, unbidden and unwelcome, had taken up residence and had to be removed
, and then, after a welcome cuppa at Tynwald, on to Shenharra.
In addition, Roger visited the Department of Tourism and DEFA to discuss the possibility that BIBBA might bring its biennial convention to the Island in 2016, where he found nothing but encouragement and support. And we fitted in a visit to the Villa Marina for Roger to consider as a possible venue for the conference.
There was some discussion during the week about the website. Our approach has been to put fresh and interesting content on the site to make it appealing and attractive, both for the old hands and for those new to beekeeping. And to assist potential beekeepers to learn and hopefully decide to become beekeepers. There is a comment box underneath each post; please feel free to comment and let us know how you find the experience of visiting the IOM Beekeepers website.
On each page there is a box for you to subscribe to the site. Every time there is a new post to the blog, the “subscribe” system generates a short excerpt emailed to your inbox. This allows you to keep up to date with new material.
At the foot of each of these emails there is an unsubscribe button, providing an opt-out of these emails if like many of us you find that the plethora of emails flooding your inbox from all sources to be a tyranny. I hope you won’t unsubscribe, but each reader has the choice.
We currently have 51 subscribers; I’d like to see 200 or more; perhaps 100 registered beekeepers on the island and 100 who find it sufficiently interesting to follow the blog. We have some way to go. I’d like to hear your views, and if you have material – pictures, interesting and relevant articles, infographics, audio or video material – that you’d like to see posted, please feel free to send it to me; we are looking for “guest” posts and items of interest!
And to go back to where we started, we look forward seeing you at Shenharra at 9am this morning, and tomorrow we move to the south of the island.
(And if you have WordPress skills and would like to help, I’d lov to hear from you, too! My email address is on the Contact page)
