Homecoming for 100-year-old fishing boat on return to museum after festival

Honeybees are under threat from poor diet

A VINTAGE fishing boat has returned to the port where it spent four decades catching lobster and haddock.

The White Wing ME113, a 33ft Baldie, was built in 1917 by a shipbuilder in Gardenstown, Aberdeenshire, for fisherman John Ritchie and was owned by his family until 1953.

It was then sold to Andrew and David Lownie, from the small fishing village of Gourdon, Aberdeenshire, where it fished for haddock and lobsters until the early 1980s.

The boat has sailed to events around the Scottish coast and stopped by Gourdon harbour yesterday, on its way back to the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Fife, from the Portsoy

Boat Festival.

Tom Carnie, president of

From left, Bob Flann, Andrew Gould, David

Crowther and Duncan McIntosh, on White Wing ME113.

the Maggie Law Maritime Museum, arranged the visit to Gourdon.

He said: “We asked if it could call on its way to Portsoy for the boat festival.

“We were too late, but the crew called in on the way back.

“The skipper, Bob

Flann, is from

Gourdon. The Quayside Restaurant and Fish Bar gave the crew complimentary fish suppers which they appreciated.”

In 1986 the boat featured in a BBC TV programme called The Shutter Falls. A HUGE multinational insecticide study has highlighted the poor health and diet of Britain’s honeybees.

Scientists found that bees in the UK were vulnerable to the potentially harmful effects of controversial nicotine-based pesticides.

Evidence suggests that, like many of the British human population, honeybees in the UK suffer from a bad diet and ill-health.

In sharp contrast, fitter and better-fed bees in Germany appeared not to be bothered by the neonicotinoid chemicals.

There were even signs that use of the insecticides temporarily benefited German bee populations.

Professor Richard Pywell, a leading member of the UK team from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), said: “We present the first evidence of negative effects of neonicotinoids on honeybees from a field experiment.

“Variation among countries was found and this suggests the effects of neonicotinoids are influenced by other factors, such as what the bees are feeding on in the landscape, and disease.

“The country-specific effects are fascinating. They do go some way to explaining why the research done on single countries has been inconsistent.”

The £2.7 million study, spanning the equivalent of 3,000 football pitches in the UK, Hungary and Germany, was the first to look at the real-world effects of neonicotinoids on bees at such a scale.

The scientists won a special dispensation to conduct their research.