Who we are and why we do it all
Spolek Čmeláci PLUS z.s. is an entity belonging to non-profit legal persons in the Czech Republic.
Read more about Bumblebees PLUS, which preceded the Association.
Our original intention was to set up just an informal group. We didn't need any legal personality or subsidies for our activities.
Over time, and as our activities expanded, we began to encounter limitations created by our lack of legal personality.
It was precisely the need to participate in formal nature protection proceedings, where we wanted to actively act as an entity, that ultimately led us, after several years of activity, to decide in December 2021 to establish
SPlus bumblebees association.
Not much will change in our activities and work, but we believe that a certain degree of formalisation and registration of the Association will help us better achieve our goals – these remain the same. However, this will give us further opportunities, including the possibility of financing larger projects, which the members' own pockets aren't sufficient for. This doesn't change the principle of our independence, however.
But we don't want to forget either, How did we come into being, and who was instrumental in the establishment of the group and subsequently the Association?.
The group was formed as a testament to the long-standing friendship of a small group of enthusiasts. We had known each other for a long time, and one beautiful day, we decided to create our own Facebook page. We wanted to create a counterbalance to a number of commercial activities that have been and still are riding the wave of interest in bumblebees. The information provided by these entities/pages is often incomplete, misleading, and sometimes downright incorrect. We wanted to address this, and to some extent, we are succeeding.
In the year 2019 We've launched our website www.cmelaciplus.cz The website was founded as a set of instructions for breeders, but also for those who want to create suitable living environments for social insects in their gardens. Its content continues to develop as environmental conditions change and bumblebee breeding evolves.
In the year 2020 We have expanded our website with further significant elements – guides for school projects, guides and experiences related to environmental care in municipalities. We have established cooperation with a number of associations. We have received our first media coverage and have begun our communication with the Ministry of the Environment and the Czech Environmental Inspectorate.
In the year 2021 We have embarked on creating our own catalogue of bumblebee species in the Czech Republic, and we have also established a Bumblebee PLUS Seed Bank. However, the main milestone is the establishment of the Association and obtaining legal personality.
Since 2021, our association has been steadily growing. However, the rule „We don't need a massive membership, therefore, only truly active members who are willing to get personally involved and aren't afraid of hard work are in the association“ still holds.“
Below are Founding members of the Čmeláci PLUS group. Ála has already left the association's ranks, but still works with us and helps where needed and where she can.
When I was young, I accidentally discovered a bumblebee nest in the garden. Ever since then, I’ve sought out bumblebees wherever I went. I was fascinated by the diversity of their species, colours, and shapes. Back then, there were many of them living in the wild. However, I couldn’t share my enthusiasm with my friends – my peers. They were more interested in aeroplanes, league tables for sports, and the like.
So I continued to learn about bumblebees more or less alone. Soon I became fascinated by J. May's work „Bumblebees of the CSR“ and F. Zapletal's „Methodology for Rearing Bumblebees“. From it, I copied my first bumblebee trap back then. Thanks to my grandfather's help, it turned out quite well. However, I had to manage the bumblebee rearing remotely at that time. I could visit the trap (there were more of them later) at weekends and during holidays.
Later, I managed to promote my hobby in my hometown too – Prague. Here, I then focused my interest on breeding rarer species of bumblebees and the problems associated with it. combined. Later, I moved on to controlled reproduction, in isolators of fertilised young queens – mothers, and subsequently to their artificial hibernation. At that time, I was already able to collaborate with my long-time friend Miroslav Stuchl.
Thanks to the internet, we have gained access to foreign information sources in our field. I am also very grateful for the friendship and cooperation with Assoc. Prof. Vladimír Ptáček, the founder of bumblebee laboratory breeding in our country. Through Vladimír, I then met another kindred spirit, Ph.D. Alena Votavová. All these names will certainly not sound unfamiliar to those interested in bumblebees.
A key moment in the public's growing interest in bumblebees in our country was undoubtedly the activity of another friend of mine – the entrepreneur Petr Dobrý. Petr knew very well how to popularise bumblebee farming, and for that, he rightly deserves our thanks. However, unfortunately, popularisation does not always entail what we would welcome for the protection of bumblebees.
Through our online activities, I met other notable promoters and friends with Ondra Hercog and a group of other excellent people – experts in the field, who dedicate a lot of their time voluntarily to our shared interest. When I was offered the opportunity to collaborate, I gladly accepted and got involved with them in improving bumblebee breeding, their hives, and supporting both novice and experienced beekeepers. Promoting and protecting bumblebees is challenging but rewarding work, so it's great that there are more of us doing it.
So have a good ride on the internet!!
Jaromír
I started keeping bumblebees when I was about six years old. Grandpa then found plans for building a beehive in a magazine and made the first prototype, to which several other small hives were gradually added.
My dad was also immediately interested, so under the supervision of my dad and grandad, I started breeding too. After a few years, I was completely self-sufficient in bumblebee keeping. I have been involved in keeping them with only a short break during my studies, right up to the present day. I can therefore offer approximately 29 years of experience. The beginnings of keeping them were not easy, there was minimal information. For example, methods of settling queens varied. In the best years, our garden was literally covered with little hives, there were about 12-13 of them. I also made some of the little hives myself from hollowed-out logs, something like birdhouses.
Of course I struggled with pests. Protective flaps didn't exist back then, and that meant annual battles with the wax moth, where I was forced to clean infested nests. Fortunately, it's now possible to fight this pest quite successfully.
However, times have moved on in every respect. The demands of breeding are changing, we have annual weather fluctuations and seemingly ongoing climate change, as well as new dangerous pests /Melittobia acasta/. If you want to be successful in breeding, you need to react to these changes.
I'm pleased to be a member of this group of like-minded friends and breeders. Among other things, I am involved in mapping occurrences and searching for rare bumblebee species.
My long-term goal is to help reintroduce at least some rare species back into our natural environment. I follow and contribute suggestions to foreign websites, where I try to communicate and possibly consult on these topics with local experts.
Beekeeping provides me with a really nice way to de-stress from a mentally demanding job.
John
Photo: Ondřej Hercog
I have been interested in nature since I was a child. Uncle Dada (doc. RNDr. Vladimír Řehořek, CSc.) had a big influence on me. For me as a boy, he was (and still is) an inexhaustible source of answers to all nature-related questions. His boyish collection of insects from Kořenec and the surrounding area also marked my destiny. Dado – thank you! 🙂
Books by E. T. Seton, G. Durrell, and similar pieces followed, which I devoured and experienced. Weekends and holidays were often spent in a huge garden in Kořenec – a garden full of flowers, insects, and birds. It was all adventures, just like young Durrell experienced.
Pit continued in nature with hiking with the Native American troop Neskenon with elements of scouting and Woodcraft (Woodcraft League).
Although I chose a technical education for my life, I still return to nature, and bumblebees are one of those paths.
I came across bumblebees by chance, apart from childhood experiments, and became completely captivated. Thanks to chance and a colleague, I found the Czech bumblebee website and it was clear. Thanks to Alena Votavová, I soon met Jaromír Čížek, from whom I learned a lot of useful things. Thanks to him, I understood that bumblebees are a lifelong passion and I soon started calling it „bombusophily“. 😀
I then administered other bumblebee pages on FB for several years, but I left those. Their focus was commercial, and the support of bumblebees and interest in them was, at best, secondary.
On 1 March 2019, largely thanks to Ála Ungerová and her encouragement, we founded the commercially independent project Čmeláci Plus. We invited other like-minded enthusiasts to join this project. They accepted the idea and we are now developing it further together. There are more of us and we are growing. It is not a „one man and woman show,“ and that makes it all the better.
Most of us spend hours with bumblebees at the expense of family and other hobbies. This allows us to fulfil our bumblebee motto and collectively move this „mega-horse“ forward. Technical improvements that have come from our shared workshop and which we offer for free use without any claims serve as an example. We often constructively argue, as I jokingly say, „about the size of the hole,“ but the result always advances bumblebee keeping. At the same time, we test everything and select what is good for further use. I am very happy about this group and the idea of working with them, even though we rarely meet in person and communication usually only takes place over the internet and telephone.
My personal goal, and the group's shared goal, is the promotion and protection of bumblebees as a pathway to nature. I don't want everyone to keep bumblebees; everyone can help them in their own way. By doing so, they will realise how fragile nature is, how little we do for it, and that we only take from it. By protecting bumblebees, we can change this. I focus a lot in my work on promoting the Bumblebees Plus project and other areas we will tackle within the project.
Everyone contributes to the common goal in some way. It's time-consuming, but I think it's working out. We're known now and this gives us a wider reach and more opportunities.
Since spring, when Ála and I launched the project and its Facebook page, our team has been growing, we've been attracting more enthusiasts, and we're expanding our topics. We're also going into greater depth and are active in areas we couldn't even dream of back in March.
I believe that together with my friends, we have something to offer, and that's precisely the PLUS in our name. The website's launch in 2019 is one of the next steps, and further ones that we want to realise together with you will follow.
Thanks to all this, I can subscribe to the motto “We're in it!”
Ondra
I started keeping bumblebees at the age of 9, that time one issue of ABC magazine 12/r30, which my parents got for me under the counter, fundamentally influenced my future life... Besides the cut-out ambulance and an article about the emergency service, there was also an article about helping nature, specifically about bumblebees, which I already admired as a child. My parents built me the first two hives according to a drawing, and my mother, as part of her medical emergency services, searched the Jičín district for bumblebee keepers, and then passed on their experiences to me. For a long time, there was no other way to exchange information...
Magazine ABC 1985 Volume 30 Issue 12, p. 12
Over 30 years have passed since I first became involved in beekeeping, with various study and work breaks. And during that time, an enormous amount has changed. Bee populations have decreased even more and far more dramatically, but in return, they are enjoying a multiplicatively greater level of interest. In my early days, there was no other option but to make the hive and everything related to it from whatever was available around the house. Today, we have an inexhaustible selection of products, high-quality materials, and, most importantly, incomparably more ways to exchange information at a speed that no one would have even dreamed of a few years ago.
Unfortunately, where there is public interest, there is also that which the early days didn't know – mere business, which targets where it can thrive the most. The easy targets are beginners and people who are enchanted by bumblebees, or for whom the state of nature is not indifferent and who want to help at least within their own garden. All of them can be similarly lost as I was when I started. Back then, information wasn't available; today, everyone claims to be helping nature and offers a guaranteed, tested product that makes my hair stand on end... Meanwhile, it's generally of no concern to the traders whether new bumblebee queens are produced in the end or not; none of them, with one honourable exception, monitor the results. Some of them, like Pilate, wash their hands of it in some company article, while others don't actually care about bumblebees at all. The main thing is that the customer buying a „bumblebee box“ is satisfied and sales are good. I am very pleased for this group, whose ethos reflects what I myself have arrived at during my breeding experiences.
The cornerstone of helping is an insect- and nature-friendly garden, where bumblebee husbandry is just the culmination of helping them, but it must be a successful culmination. As we lie to the bumblebee queen with our hives, telling her that what we offer her is the best for her, it is our duty to ensure that this is indeed the case, using current knowledge. Otherwise, the hive becomes a trap for her, in which the colony will bake, freeze, or be wiped out by parasites before it can fulfil its life's mission. And this mission is not for us to have pretty workers and a pollinated garden, but a new generation of queens and males, necessary for the survival of the species the following year.. Then the entire breeding effort makes sense, and unfortunately, with declining bumblebee populations in nature, there is no room for half-hearted or rushed solutions aimed solely at pleasing people. Therefore, I am very happy to be a member of a group of people who feel the same way.
Ála Ungerová
Lover of natural gardens, of all the living things within them (except slugs), a passionate gardener and a grammar tamer
Alas
PS.
As Ala hasn't written much about herself, I'll write a little about her without her kind permission.
Ála from Děčín is an ethereal being, yet at the same time distinctive and strong. Personality. A gardener, a photographer, a mother of two beautiful daughters, the creator of several gardens, and the architect of many men's broken hearts.
Although she lives in the North, she is not at all cold and anyone who lives with her will certainly never be bored.
They therefore deserve my admiration – both of them 🙂
I met Ála on other bumblebee pages, where I, as she puts it, „splattered“ texts and she patiently edited and corrected them grammatically. In 2018, she became much more involved in the work and was co-administrator of those pages with me. When we realised at the beginning of 2019 that the founders of those pages were primarily business-minded, we ended our cooperation with them.
It was precisely Ála who persuaded me that quitting was too easy and the established community of those passionate about bumblebees didn't deserve it. It was she who came up with the idea of starting new bumblebee pages on FB and the web. It was also she who pushed me and literally roped me into it. Thanks to her, we launched Čmeláci PLUS on Facebook on March 1, 2019.
Our collective baby has now parked itself a little and flown off to dedicate more time to other hobbies. Nevertheless, and perhaps precisely because of it, everything I've bragged about her here is still with us and one of us.
Thanks Alo!
Oh.