Snoqualmie Valley Beekeepers
Please join us Tuesday night for our SVBA club meeting at Meadowbrook Farm.
Our meeting schedule will be loosely structured as follows:
6:45-7:00: Grab a snack and find a seat
7:00-8:00 Guest speaker presentation/Q&A
8:00-8:15: Club Announcements/Grab another snack
8:15-8:30: Monthly To-Do’s/Q&A
8:30-9:00: Social time and clean up
Our guests will be Peter and Amy Beth Nolte, the owners and operators of Rainy Day Bees. The title of Peter’s talk is “Contradictions of Swarm Management”.
Peter and Amy Beth manage 150 hives in urban, suburban, and rural areas from Mt Rainier to Monroe. They enjoy using their decade of experience running Rainy Day Bees for educating the public and beekeepers about responsible and effective beekeeping in our many different local environments.
Every beekeeper will encounter and needs to know how to prevent or manage the urge of their bees to swarm, it’s how colonies reproduce. There are many ways to manage this and how a beekeeper decides to do it is largely dependent on the equipment and space available to them as well as their desired outcome for the colony (e.g. increase vs. honey production).
We look forward to learning about what strategies Rainy Day Bees use for swarm management based on where the hive is located and what they are trying to achieve with the colony living inside.
If desired, there will be a brief presentation of To-Do’s for March to maintain your colonies and prepare for the upcoming season and a Q&A session to allow those in attendance an opportunity to ask any burning (stinging?) questions to which they will get multiple conflicting, yet correct, answers to.
We will finish the evening with social time, a great opportunity to meet and chat with your fellow local beekeepers!