Trustees

Gavin has kept bees from the mid-1990s and since then he has managed to make most of the possible beekeeping mistakes! He chairs SNHBS, helps his local association and presents regularly on bee topics across Scotland and beyond.  He used to be the Bee Health and Science Officer for the SBA until May 2020.  He has also given up being a plant geneticist, and is starting to find out that running a beekeeping business is not for the easily distracted or the disorganised!

John has been beekeeping 40 years. Searching for good native type bees that are well adapted to their locality has been his main motivation for many years. Latterly he has become more interested in looking at a more sustainable and ethical approach to our beekeeping practices. John is currently vice-president of his local beekeeping association and a SBA member. He spends his spare time looking at nature and photography and can still manage reasonable hill walks.

Sarah started keeping bees in 2013. What started out as a hobby to get her away from work at the computer has become a bit of an obsession. She is on the steering committee for Tarland Bee Group, in Aberdeenshire, where she helps with the beginners’ classes, mentoring and arranging the winter talks. Sarah is quite happy to spend all day beekeeping at her various apiaries across Royal Deeside, but equally is delighted when one of her four lads comes along to help. 

Jim has been keeping bees since 2014. After retiring from the NHS he became a member of Edinburgh and Midlothian Beekeepers Association and managed the EMBA apiary where he started a queen rearing programme. Having moved to the Borders he has now about twenty colonies in various locations including the Dawyck Botanic Garden, and an isolation apiary for the breeding of Apis mellifera mellifera .  For him getting to know bees – and beekeepers- has been a wonderful experience.

I have been keeping bees for about seven years and currently have around 30 colonies. I am a past Secretary of Helensburgh & District Beekeepers Association and I’m keen to get a local breeding group off the ground.  I am also interested in looking for wild bees in the Argyle & Bute area, much of which is sparsely populated. In 2023 I attended an Instrumental Insemination course to understand if it could be a way to increase native bee stocks in the future.