An evening with British Beekeeper John Hamilton
BEEKEEPING, MIGRATORY AND TRADITIONAL, IN JAPAN, CHINA AND KOREA
Thursday, May 8th 2008, 7:00 p.m.
Figaro Coffee Shop, 2nd floor. 160 Xingye Road, Xintiandi
John Hamilton lives in Japan and keeps bees, both native and western, around his house in Aichi. His talk for us comes at the end of a week of visiting beekeepers in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces. John will tell of his encounters with Chinese beekeepers and their bees, especially in Hubei (two queen hives in February, delicious Jingtiao honey), Heilongjiang (very good lime honey) and Taiwan (famous for Royal Jelly). He will also talk about migratory beekeeping in Japan (loading beehives onto lorries, the problem of bears, the large wasps that attack hives in September), and about log hive beekeeping with native bees in the villages in Korea close to the demilitarized zone. John will bring his equipment with him – bee net, smoker, whisky, books about beekeeping in China, magnifying glass and hopefully samples of honey from Anhui.
Professor John Hamilton, a graduate of University College Oxford, teaches in the Faculty of Law at AichiUniversity. In 1946 the University, formerly the Toa Dobun Shoin in Shanghai, occupied an abandoned army camp in Toyohashi as staff and students returned to Japan. It still survives as the main campus today. Close relations with China, especially with NankaiUniversity in Tianjin, have continued, and today it is one of the leading universities for Chinese studies in Japan. Thanks to university research funding, John became acquainted with the bees of China upon attending the World Congress of Beekeepers (Apimondia) in Beijing in 1992. The event attracted a swarm of around 5,000 beekeepers from around the globe, including 800 from China.