East Hanningfield Archive

"Collecting a Swarm.  

"Both my grandfather and father were beekeepers and Desmond eventually ended up as President of the Essex Bee Keepers Association.  With friends in the Asociation, he helped set up a Pollination Scheme in the early 1960s for local farmers, at a time when spraying crops with DDT had decimated natural populations of pollinators.  

"This is early summer 1952, Dad about to collect the swarm hanging in the bush into a straw skep, ably assisted by my brother as his 'smoker boy'!"

From the collection of P. Ost.