Belarusian beekeeper shared his experience with Tomsk residents

The meeting of Tomsk beekeepers with Belarusian expert Dmitry Rakhmatulin was held as part of the expert session "Beekeeping in the Tomsk Region. Modern Apiary in Farms and Private Farmsteads. Tools for an Effective Apiary" at the Tomsk Agricultural College.
About a hundred beekeepers from Tomsk and the region's districts gathered to listen to their foreign colleague. About the same number watched the broadcast of the event on social networks.
As Dmitry Rakhmatulin emphasized, despite the different climatic conditions, the general aspects of beekeeping in Siberia and Belarus are not much different.
"Beekeepers from different countries have a lot in common. This is, for example, treating bees for mites: using different preparations, combining preparations with different active substances during one season. These are technological aspects, for example, changing the types of hives to optimize costs, the frequency and methods of replacing queen bees, - said Dmitry Rakhmatulin. - I tell how I work in my apiary. But the audience has the right to decide for themselves whether to follow the proposed path or not."
The speech of the Belarusian guest, the head of the industry laboratory of the Republican Scientific and Production Subsidiary Unitary Enterprise "Institute of Fruit Growing", lasted more than five hours. The audience listened to the speaker with interest and actively asked questions.
"You can feel that the person not only understands the topic, but deeply understands beekeeping," shared his impressions Anton Ionenko, a beekeeper from the Tomsk region, "Such meetings help to look at familiar things from a different angle, change your thinking."
Several more speakers spoke at the expert session. Deputy Chairman of the Committee for the Development of Rural Territories and the Agro-Food Market of the Department for Social and Economic Development of the Village of the Tomsk Region Vitaly Zaborsky spoke about the current measures of state support for beekeeping in the region, including the "Agrostartup" grant.
Leading researcher of the Institute for Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. Galina Simonova gave a presentation on how the isotope ratio mass spectrometry method can detect counterfeit honey.
More than 12 thousand bee colonies are officially registered in the Tomsk region, which produced more than 300 tons of honey in 2023.