View Through a Dirty Windscreen.

After yesterday evening’s and last night’s snow, there was quite a lot of the stuff around first thing this morning. However, the forecast and road reports were good so we set off for Perth for another bee meeting; we had no problems, though many people had not believed the reports and had stayed in bed. We took the precautions of having plenty of warm clothing, food and drink; a wise measure but, as it turned out, un-necessary. By the time we started the return journey, the snow had utterly vanished away and the sun was shining out of a clear blue sky. As a parting shot, as I came into the village, the sky turned black and there was the most incredible lighting and blizzard; but, by the time I had parked the car, grabbed a camera and run to a suitable vantage point, the opportunity had gone.
 
The talks were good: first was a young professor of zoological genetics whose normal talk I have heard so many times that I can now recite it (though without understanding a word); however, he was discussing the price of sequencing the bee genome, fast coming down to about £25, and the impact this would have on the black bee breeding programme proposed yesterday.
There followed a talk by a veterinary researcher who has tested the infamous manuka honey as well as a load of others. His results were that manuka honey is good for dressing wounds, but not as good as some Scottish honeys, including heather. He has a theory, yet to be tested, that local honey is best, his argument being that bees evolved to produce bactericides that they put into honey to help preserve it, and that, naturally, they produce them to combat the local bacteria. This has profound implications; the places where honey based wound dressings are most urgently needed are in the third world; they are already producing loads of their own honey but cannot afford the grossly inflated price of New Zealand honey. It also gives further backing to the Scottish amateur bee keepers’ philosophy that locally bred bees are better than exotics. While I class this as the science of the bleedin’ obvious, it is still too subtle for many bee keepers to understand – including a few of the executive officers of the Scottish Beekeeping Association.