2025 WBKA AGM & Annual Winter Lecture

7pm, Tuesday 28 January 2025

in the Wessex Room at the Devizes Corn Exchange, Market Place, Devizes SN10 1HS.

Please email the Secretary if you would like to attend:

WBKA members will be sent the Agenda, a copy of the minutes of the last AGM, and any relevant papers in advance of the meeting. After the AGM, the Annual Winter Lecture:

‘The bees are in trouble’ by Dr Richard Comont

Why are Britain’s bumblebees declining? And what have honeybees got to do with it?

‘The bees are in trouble’ is a catechism of the modern-day environmental movement.
But which bees? The UK is home to more than 270 species – some rare, some
common, some decreasing (or even extinct), some stable, and some expanding their
ranges and increasing their population abundance. Each species has slightly different
needs – foraging time, flower species, nesting sites, etc. – and they’re all in competition
with each other, which means that ‘helping’ one species won’t necessarily help all the
others and may even harm them.

Honeybees are super-generalist foragers and their close relationship with people (especially
beekeepers!) means that they are both easy to ‘help’ by keeping/hosting hives, and, by the
same token, easy to keep in such numbers that they overload an ecosystem. We explore
the potential impacts of honeybees on wild bees and how these can be avoided.

Dr Richard Comont is an ecologist and author. Since 2013 he has led the scientific
work of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a national charity focused on conservation
of the UK’s bumblebee species. A major part of this is leading on monitoring work to
understand the current state of bumblebee populations and assess the impacts of both
conservation management and ongoing threats to UK bumblebees.


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