Speaker - Margaret Thomas. CSP, NDB

Subject - Swarm Control for the busy beekeeper

Refreshments will be severed and there will be a raffle.

Margaret Thomas lived in Essex where she and her husband Dick learnt their beekeeping in the 1970s under the tutelage of Ted Hooper, County Beekeeping Instructor at Writtle Agricultural College. She retired to Scotland in 2009. During the time spent In Essex she passed her BBKA examinations to become a Master Beekeeper and then went on to get her NDB in 1982.

She is a retired Bee Farmer - the BFA that represents commercial beekeepers in the UK and during that time managed between 40 and 60 colonies. As a bee farmer she served on the committee as Magazine, Pesticides, Minutes and Pollination secretary, the latter managing placing a round 1000 hives in Kent on top fruit, some hives on borage and oil seed rape north of the Thames. Representing the BFA she joined a research group as the beekeeper providing the colonies for a project on pyrrolizidine alkaloids in ragwort and borage honey. She was awarded Life Membership of the BFA.

Margaret has given lectures in a number of counties in England, Scotland, Ulster and has also been a guest lecturer a number of times at the weeks' course at Gormanston just north of Dublin. She has been the weeks' tour lecturer for Scotland twice.

She is now a committee member of the Scottish Beekeepers' Association, where her brief is all
subjects related to hive products. Beekeeping as an amateur with a limited number of colonies in a fickle climate is a new challenge. She continues to teach beekeeping and is currently the secretary to the NDB Board. She is one of the Moderators of the BBKA Examinations Board and also tutors for the BBKA Correspondence Course.