AMBA January 11,2008 meeting

The first meeting of 2008 of the ALLEGHENY MOUNTAIN BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION was called to order by Steve Martin. The minutes and treasures report were given by Mike Burkett. The meeting quickly turned into a demonstration by Steve Martin of the new website as Steve drove us through all the amenities of this new and useful site. It is apparent early on of the time and effort that has been done on this site to make it user friendly and also to serve our members. It is a much appreciated job that Steve has done. Later we turned our attention to some very nice refreshments and then the meeting resumed with talk about a summer field day, June 21,2008 at Camp Hickory to be shared with Hampshire and Garrett County bee clubs. Expect to hear more on this as we get closer to that date . Many thanks to Hop Cassidy from Garrett County and Harry Mallow for their input and suggestions on this upcoming event.
One of the highlights of the meeting were 2 observation bee hives brought in by Harry Mallow. The queen in one of these was laying eggs as the meeting transpired. This really is quite uncommon for our area to witness this in January. Normally we expect queens to start laying a small brood pattern in January and continue laying as pollen becomes available from maple tree buds, but we have never seen this in a observation hive this early in the year! The significance of this is that we can raise our queens this time of year and not have to buy queens from the southern part of the United States.We will be able to do this and trade queens with other members to maintain some bio-diversity in our bees and only use the queens from hives who show the characteristics we want,docile bees with good housekeeping traits . This is exciting as we have been preaching to our members to try this technique of raising queens. More on this later as we will interview Harry Mallow to find out exactly what he did to manage this.

Walt Shreve