With more people keeping bees and chickens, interest in the last Royal Show is booming. Jo Ind reports

Just when the decision has been made to no longer hold a Royal Show, what happens? Advanced ticket sales are up by 55 per cent on this time last year.

In a classic case of “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” more than 100,000 visitors are expected at the show organised by the Royal Agricultural Society of England and held at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire.

In particular the smallholdings section of the show, which runs from Tuesday until Friday next week, has never been so popular as the trend towards having a little farm in the back garden grows.

In the past year, the smallholder retailer Countrywide has seen a 40 per cent increase in net sales across all poultry products in the past year.

Simon McEwan, editor of Country Smallholding magazine, said: “Many suppliers report that business has been very brisk over the past year. From humble beginnings in the 1970s, the grow-your-own revolution is gathering pace.

“Concerns about food security, climate change, food miles and the energy crisis are also considerations. No doubt the credit crunch is having an effect too.”

RASE’s Sarah Beveridge said: “Keeping chickens is just the start. We will be offering advice and practical demonstrations on beekeeping, milking goats, and even spinning the wool from your own alpacas – not to mention how to prepare a pig for slaughter or the artificial insemination of goats.”

Clive Joyce, aged 65, first became interested in beekeeping as a result of seeing a demonstration at the Royal Show 30 years ago.

“I would like to say that I’m personally quite saddened by the fact that it’s going to be the last one,” he said. “It will be missed by an awful lot of people. We know the economic situation and that you cannot go on putting on things that are making a loss, but I think it’s something that Warwickshire is going to miss.

“It’s been in our lives for the last 46 years actually in Stoneleigh. That’s what got me into beekeeping. I went to the Royal Show one year and saw the beekeeping demonstration and was hooked immediately.”

At next week’s show Clive, from Kenilworth, Warwickshire, who cares for the bees at the British Beekeeping Association’s Apiary at Stoneleigh Park, will be steward for the honey stand at the show.

“We’ve had more entries this year than we’ve had for many years,” he says. “We’ve had 360 entries that consists of honeys of all types – set, liquid, heathers. It ranges from honey for commercial sale to individuals putting in a single jar. There are also wax products, a honey cake section and a mead section.”

There will also be demonstrations of the innermost parts of a bee hive of the kind which got Clive buying his own colony all those years ago. Visitors will be able to observe two bee colonies, each containing 60,000 bees, learn from the experts about the lifecycle of a bee and try some local honey.

Clive says there has been an enormous resurgence in beekeeping. Just in the past year, membership of the Warwick and Leamington Beekeepers Association has gone up from 60 members to almost 100.

“We’ve put a great deal of effort into it as a branch,” he says. “We’ve run courses and given information to people. But it’s also to do with a general interest in the environment.

“Once beekeepers were in a bit of a backwater. Now the media is taking an interest in beekeeping. People like the idea of having their own honey.”

This, of course, is good news for bees which are disappearing at an alarming rate.

“We don’t know why, as beekeepers, because we’re not scientists but we think it’s to do with a parasitic mite called vorroam,” says Clive. “The Government has given money to research this but the money is research into all pollinating insects so whether all that money would go towards bee-keeping, I don’t know.

“For me beekeeping is all about getting into contact with nature. It’s like being a farmer on a very much smaller scale. You can keep a hive in your back garden and it won’t interfere with anybody.

“People believe wrongly that bees go out of their way to sting people. They don’t. Their main aim in life is for the good of the colony and so as long as you don’t go poking them with a stick, they’re fine. They live their lives and you live yours.

“You can get around 30lb of honey per hive per year. That’s the average. It’s like growing your own vegetables, it always tastes better if it’s your own.”

Keeping chickens is another hobby which is expanding in popularity and becoming a way of life for many. At the Royal Show there will be more than 1,000 different types of poultry and water fowl on display.

Peter Heywood, aged 80, from Atherstone, Warwickshire, is the chief steward. “Interest in keeping chickens has increased immensely in the past few years,” he says. “A lot more people are keeping chickens than there were ten years ago. In the last three or four years, we’ve had many more of all sorts of inquiries.

“I think its because of Jamie Oliver and the way it’s taking off in the media. People want good quality fresh organic food. People keep their own chickens because they like the fresh eggs that they get. Some people just like having them running in their garden, you know.”

Peter, however, is an exception. He has been keeping cochins since 1964 but does not enjoy the luxury of eating their eggs.

“You either have to a be a king, a millionaire or a bloody idiot to keep them,” says Peter, who has 20. “You’re lucky if you get 30 eggs in a year. You can’t eat them. They’re so infertile. From those eggs you might get six chicks. If you ate that egg that had got the chick in you’d never forgive yourself would you?

“But there’s something very special about them. They’ve got feathery feet all the way up. They’re not everybody’s chicken but they behave very special. These chickens, if you pick up any one it wouldn’t flutter, wouldn’t fly away, wouldn’t do nothing. You can pick them up, just as you’d pick up your cat.”

Peter is also interested in the history of the birds, which first came to England in 1854 as food on the China ships and were presented to Queen Victoria. They became the chicken for the upper classes but then popularity dwindled to the point where there were only 12 breeders in the country in the early 1900s.

It was in 1960, that Peter went to a poultry sale, saw some cochins and fell in love with them. He went on to became the president of the Cochin Club and has been showing his birds ever since.

“I’m a bit sad that it’s going to be the last Royal,” he says. “There will still be shows but not as we know it today. Whoever comes along will be greeted with a kind word and a smile.”

Chairman of the RASE Trustees, Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, said: “We hope everyone will support the Society and make a real effort to come to Stoneleigh, have a great day out, enjoy the livestock, horses, technical features and shopping and bid a fond farewell to an event that has long been held in great affection by farmers and others who work and live in the British countryside.”