Join the B4 Project on April 17, 2027, at Cotehele NT for a fun day installing the Rocket and Log Hive!

Saturday, 17 April 2027 – Rocket and Log Hive Installation at Cotehele National Trust

10:00 am –. Installation of Rocket Hive

12:00 noon – Lunch at Cotehele Café.

1:00 pm – Installation of the log hive.

3:00 pm – Finish.

What Attendees Should Expect

Meet at Cotehele House reception. The group will walk to Folly Field, where Matthew and Filipe will install the rocket hive. Ben will accompany the group, providing an overview of the National Trust’s conservation work across the estate, with a particular focus on parkland and woodland management.

Bring packed lunch or purchase lunch at Cotehele Café.

Sunday, 18 April 2027 – B4 Academic Symposium: More Free-Living Honey Bees

Book Sundays event through Calstock Arts Events

Venue: Calstock Arts

Time: 10:00 am – 3:30 pm.

Programme:

Presentation from the National Trust on local Nature Restoration and Woodland Management.

Update from the University of Plymouth Free-Living Honey Bee Project.

Presentation by Norman Carreck on the Isles of Scilly biosecurity status and an update on the Asian Hornet invasive species.

BeeBytes –Honey bee genetics – what do they tell us?

Additional Information:

The symposium will have an online presence and will be filmed for broadcast on YouTube.

What Delegates Should Expect

For anyone interested in the survival of honey bees as they face more challenges, learning about ongoing exploration of how they are living wild without intervention from beekeepers will be illuminating. Work at Plymouth University looking at Free-Living Honey Bees over the past year will be explained and discussed. Citizen science is contributing, and you will learn how you too can take part. There will closer consideration of some of the threats to honey bees, focusing on the invasive Asian Hornet and Honey-Bee genetics. The Asian Hornet frequently wipes out whole colonies in European countries. Mixing up of the genetic makeup (introgression) of honey bees, thanks to decades of importing other strains, is likely to be contributing to the reduction of the resilience in native bees built up through evolution, but is evolution still going on despite introgression?

Key Takeaway

We will learn about the work being done to identify and to support free-living honey bees. We will appreciate how important these bees are for the overall survival of the honey bee, including those kept in hives. Whether we are beekeepers or just people who care, we will learn how we can do more to promote that survival.

Description supplied by the event organiser.