KANGAROO ISLAND BEEKEEPERS

Every so often I get the newsletter from the secretary of the K.I. Beekeepers Assoc., Betty McAdam and it is always interesting and worth sharing. Here are a couple of extracts from the April edition:

K.I. BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION
No. 71 April, 2008

Dr. Duke reports he has been successful in obtaining funding by a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Special Call into Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), grant for $285,000 over three years on “Complementary medicines based on propolis produced by honeybees from Australian flora”.
The CAM call was a highly competitive process that resulted in only 9.4% of the applications being funded.
Dr. Duke will now be visiting Kangaroo Island between the 16th – 20th May to collect samples of vegetation so as to identify the source of the unique compounds identified from Kangaroo Island propolis.The members will be asked to indicate whether they wish the Association to host an informal meeting to provide an opportunity to meet Dr. Duke during his visit, or whether some other function should be arranged.

SNIPPETS FROM THE WORLD OF BEEKEEPERS
An excerpt from The Daily Northwestern
Monday, January 28, 1889 Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Pigeons and Bees

A Pigeon fancier of Hamme, Prussia, made a bet that a dozen bees liberated three miles from their hive would reach it in better time than a dozen pigeons would reach their cote from the same distance. The competitors were given wing at Rynhern, a village nearly a league from Hamme, and the first bee finished a quarter of a minute in advance of the first pigeon, three other bees reached the goal before the second pigeon, the main body of both detachments finished almost simultaneously an instant or two later. The bees, too, had been handicapped in the race, having been rolled in flour before starting, for the purposes of identification.