I attended our Virginia State Beekeepers Association Fall 2019 meeting at the Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave, Virginia, held the first Saturday in November. The theme this year was all about queens, as we had two wonderful speakers discuss their research: Heather Matilla and Alison McAfee. Posting this at the end of November seems to bookmark the month rather nicely.
Title slide for one of the talks at the VSBA 2019 Fall Meeting
Native bees have piqued my interest this year. There are so many varieties sharing the flowers with our honey bees. We had Sam Droege of the U.S. Geological Survey speak at a recent club meeting, and he advocated the benefits of bee watching as an alternative to butterfly or bird watching. There are more bee species than butterflies and birds combined, and bees are much more stationary than most birds. Perhaps this will become a pastime.
So I have been studying the biological taxonomic hierarchy of bees lately. It is all rather confusing, so this write-up will perhaps clarify this for myself as well as a couple readers.
I gathered much of the material here from Wikipedia, and also verified some information with other sources. You may complain that Wikipedia is not the best original source if you wish.
My honey bees (a hybrid of Apis mellifera carnica) at the entrance to my hive Saturn on October 28, 2017.
I posted a short summary of the CCBA Conference yesterday, so today I thought I would describe the advanced track presented by Tom Seeley and Michael Palmer. Even though they alternated, I thought a separate post for each of them would make sense. This post is about Tom Seeley’s three sessions on topics related to wild bees, honey production control systems, and water management. I was especially looking forward to seeing Tom Seeley, as I greatly enjoyed his book Honeybee Democracy about swarming. Continue reading
Bees with eeb 