IELTS General Training Reading Practice Test 33

Text A — BROOKLAND BEEKEEPERS' BEGINNER COURSE: ADVERTISEMENT

The Brookland Beekeepers' Association (BBA) is currently running its annual beginner course for new beekeepers from April through September. Whether you have already bought your first hive or are simply curious about taking up beekeeping, the course is designed to give you the practical and theoretical knowledge to manage a single colony safely through its first season.

Format: - Theory sessions: ten Tuesday evenings, 19:00-21:00, in the upstairs room of the Old Granary public house. Topics typically include bee biology, the seasonal cycle of a colony, swarm management, common diseases, and safe inspection procedure. - Apiary visits: ten Saturday mornings, 10:00-12:30, at the BBA teaching apiary on Heaton Allotments. Each beginner is normally paired with an experienced mentor and rotates through every hive in the teaching apiary over the season. - Honey harvest day: one Saturday in early September (date confirmed by week 6 of the course) at which the apiary's combined harvest is extracted and bottled. Beginners typically receive a small jar to take home.

Cost: £180 for the full course, including BBA membership for the calendar year, all printed materials, and personal protective equipment loaned for apiary sessions. A 50% concession is available for under-25s, full-time students, and unwaged applicants. The first session is open as a "taster" to anyone considering the course; please book the taster through the website.

Important notes: - Beekeeping may involve working with stinging insects. Anyone with a known severe allergic reaction to bee or wasp stings must declare this on registration. The BBA generally cannot accept beginners with anaphylactic-history without written clearance from their GP. - All apiary work is outdoor and proceeds in light rain. Sessions are normally cancelled only in heavy rain, thunder, or strong wind; cancellation is communicated by 08:00 on the Saturday by group text. - Beginners must not bring their own equipment to apiary sessions in the first half of the course; we will train you on club equipment before discussing yours. - Children aged 12-15 may attend with a participating parent at no extra cost; under-12s are not permitted on the apiary.

Text B — BROOKLAND BEEKEEPERS' ASSOCIATION: MEMBERSHIP RULES (EXTRACT)

Membership of the BBA is open to all who keep bees, or wish to keep bees, within the Brookland district. The rules below are an extract of the constitution most relevant to active members.

Membership tiers and fees: - Full member (over 18 with own hives): £45/year, includes liability insurance for up to three hives. - Associate member (no hives, e.g. course beginners): £25/year, no insurance. - Junior member (12-17): £15/year, must be largely sponsored by a full member. - Honorary member (former officers and long-service members): no fee, lifelong rights.

Apiary access: - Members may access the teaching apiary on Heaton Allotments only when accompanied by an authorised key-holder. Solo apiary entry is not permitted under any circumstances, even by full members. - The shared honey extractor in the apiary shed is bookable in two-hour slots, free for full members.

Member obligations: - All members keeping hives within the Brookland district must normally register their apiary on the national BeeBase database. The BBA generally cannot legally hold member apiary details that have not been registered. - Any member who suspects notifiable disease (American Foul Brood, European Foul Brood, or Small Hive Beetle) must report immediately to the National Bee Inspector AND notify the BBA secretary within 24 hours. - Members may not sell honey labelled with the BBA logo without first submitting a sample for assessment by the swarm and quality committee.

Annual general meeting: held on the third Saturday of February. All members may attend; only full and honorary members may vote.

Text C — HEATHERFORD HIVES: BEE-YARD APPRENTICESHIP — APPRENTICE HANDBOOK (EXTRACT)

Heatherford Hives is a commercial apiary currently employing nine full-time staff and operating around 600 production colonies across six rural sites. The bee-yard apprenticeship is a 24-month, structured programme leading to a Level 3 qualification in commercial beekeeping. The following handbook extract sets out the duties and expectations of the apprentice in the bee-yard itself.

Daily duties at the home apiary: - Apprentices generally arrive at the bee-yard at 07:00 in summer, 08:00 in winter. The first task each day is normally to check the previous night's CCTV recording for evidence of disturbance and to walk the perimeter of the yard for fallen trees, damaged fencing, or signs of badger activity. - Smoker preparation: smokers are fuelled with hessian and rotten wood from the wood pile. Apprentices light their smoker before any colony work and must not let it go out during inspections. The yard manager will normally refuse to allow an inspection to continue if a smoker is permitted to die. - Equipment checks: hive tools must be flame-sterilised between any apiary visited that day. Veils must be inspected for tears before donning. Damaged veils must be removed from circulation immediately and reported on the equipment log.

Inspection responsibilities: - Year 1 apprentices may open, inspect and reassemble a colony only under direct supervision of a senior bee-yard staff member. From month 12 onwards, apprentices may inspect colonies on the home yard solo, provided two staff are within shouting distance. - Every inspection must be largely recorded in the yellow yard book: date, weather, queen seen (Y/N), brood pattern (1-5 scale), stores, varroa count, and any actions taken. The yard book is photographed and uploaded to the office at the end of every day. - Disease management: any suspected notifiable disease must be reported immediately to the yard manager and the inspection abandoned at that hive. The hive is then normally marked with a red ribbon for follow-up by the National Bee Inspector.

Safe lifting: full honey supers are heavy and must be lifted from the knees. Apprentices weighing under 65 kg may not lift full supers unassisted. The yard rule is that any super weighing more than 20 kg is a two-person lift. Text D — APPRENTICE TRAINING PATHWAY, REVIEWS AND PROGRESSION

The 24-month apprenticeship is structured around four six-month blocks, with reviews at the end of each block. Block 1 (months 1-6) — Foundations. The apprentice spends the majority of time shadowing senior staff. Mandatory completion of: an in-house safety induction, the BBKA basic assessment (taken in late May or early June regardless of start date), Manual Handling, and a written biosecurity test.

Block 2 (months 7-12) — Supervised practice. The apprentice takes increasing responsibility for inspections on the home yard, under supervision. The end-of-block competency observation requires the apprentice to demonstrate, in front of the yard manager, a full inspection of three colonies with no critical errors.

Block 3 (months 13-18) — Outyard rotation. The apprentice normally rotates through three of the company's five outyards. Each outyard rotation lasts six weeks. The apprentice is paired with an outyard lead who provides written feedback at the end of each rotation. Solo inspection on the home yard becomes routine; outyard solo inspection is still not permitted.

Block 4 (months 19-24) — Toward sign-off. The apprentice manages a dedicated "apprentice group" of ten colonies on the home yard, taking responsibility for the seasonal schedule. The end-of-apprenticeship review covers the yard book record for these ten colonies, a viva-voce on bee diseases, and a written essay of 2,500 words on a topic chosen jointly with the yard manager.

Progression after sign-off: graduates of the apprenticeship typically join Heatherford as Junior Beekeepers on the standard salary scale, although a small number have moved directly into management roles in partner apiaries elsewhere. The company normally commits to discussing onward employment with every apprentice no later than month 21.

A The image of beekeeping is overwhelmingly rural — wooden hives on the edge of a meadow, the keeper in a white suit moving among them under a clear country sky. Yet beekeeping in cities is far older than is often supposed, and over the past three decades it has undergone something close to a revolution. From rooftop hives on five-star hotels in central Paris to community apiaries on the flat roofs of London tower blocks, the urban honeybee has become both a hobby and a small but visible industry. The story is not the simple, unbroken narrative that some advocates suggest, and it is worth tracing carefully.

B Bees have lived alongside humans in cities for as long as there have been cities. Roman writers including Virgil and Columella described honey production in and around urban gardens, and archaeological remains of clay-jar hives have been found in the residential quarters of ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Mediaeval monasteries, often built within or close to settlements, kept large apiaries to provide both honey and beeswax — the latter essential for the candles required for church services. The keeping of bees in urban environments was, in other words, an ordinary feature of pre-industrial life, not a recent novelty.

C What changed was the industrial city. Through the nineteenth century, urban beekeeping declined sharply across Western Europe and North America. Streets were dirtier, air was full of coal smoke, the open ground from which honeybees foraged was being built over at speed, and bees were widely perceived as a rural rather than urban concern. By the early twentieth century, urban beekeeping in most large European and North American cities had become a minority pursuit confined to a few enthusiasts on the edge of the city, where market gardens and orchards still survived. In some cities, local by-laws actively discouraged it.

D The mid-twentieth century saw the first organised attempts to bring beekeeping back into cities. In the United States, individual amateurs began experimenting with rooftop hives in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, often quietly and sometimes illegally. In Britain, the London Beekeepers' Association recorded a slow growth in registered urban apiaries from the 1970s. But the real turning point was the late 1990s and 2000s, when growing public anxiety about pollinator decline made beekeeping suddenly visible. The phrase "save the bees" became a common slogan, and well-known cultural and commercial institutions began to install demonstration hives.

E The 2010s are widely regarded as the high point of the urban-beekeeping boom. Famous examples generally include hives on the roof of the Paris Opera (established 1985 but widely publicised after 2010), on the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, on the Manhattan Waldorf Astoria, and on the roof of the Royal Albert Hall. Local authorities in many cities legalised or actively encouraged urban beekeeping. New apiaries multiplied at a striking rate: London is estimated to have gone from a few hundred registered hives in 2008 to several thousand by 2018, and similar growth was recorded in Paris and Berlin. Honey marketed as "urban" or specifically as "rooftop" honey became a niche but premium product.

F The boom has not been without serious questioning. From around 2015, ecologists and entomologists began publishing studies arguing that the urban-bee craze had been good for honeybees but potentially bad for other pollinators. Honeybees are a managed agricultural species, and unusually dense populations of them in a city can outcompete the many wild bee species — solitary bees, bumblebees, hoverflies — on which urban pollination actually depends. A series of studies in Paris, London and Berlin in the late 2010s identified zones where the carrying capacity of available forage was being exceeded by managed hives. Some city authorities have responded with caps and registration systems; Paris briefly considered a moratorium on new hives in the city centre.

G What seems likely now is a more measured future. Urban beekeeping is unlikely to disappear; the cultural and educational value of demonstration hives in schools, museums and community gardens is widely recognised, and well-managed apiaries do contribute to the urban ecosystem. But the unbridled "more hives the better" enthusiasm of the 2010s appears to be giving way to a more sophisticated approach, with city-wide carrying-capacity studies, formal registration, and an explicit aim of supporting the wider pollinator community rather than honeybees alone. In this sense urban beekeeping is undergoing the kind of professional maturation that other amateur activities — community composting, urban gardening — went through in earlier decades.