Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Busy as Bees - SIBA Hanover/Madison Chapter

The first quarter of 2015 was a fun and exciting time for the Madison/Hanover chapter of Southeastern Indiana Beekeepers Association. After taking a weather break in January, the February and March meetings allowed club members to learn ways to increase their apiary size without buying bees. First, Jim Orem shared his very successful ideas and tips on setting up traps and catching feral swarms. The next month, Dave Shenefield showed the group how to take the bees that survived the winter and make splits and nucs.


Additionally, when March rolled around, IBA treasurer Debbie Seib arrived to award the club with our ‘seed’ money. This funding is provided to start up clubs which have maintained 25 attendees consecutively at 3 meetings.  This is  as a way to help the club with such things as signs, printing, guest presentations, or whatever.

Finally, at the end of March, Ginger Davidson provided a talk about bees at th Clarksville Library to a small yet interested crowd.  This was followed by a Beekeeping 101 class sponsored by the club and taught to a sold out classroom by Ginger. The class was held at the Little Golden Fox in Madison Indiana which provided a unique and different atmosphere in the classroom typically used for teaching milk painting and other crafting projects. Next to local clubs, there isn’t a better way to find mentors and stay in touch with beekeeping than through the state organizations. Therefore, the exciting aspect about this class was that some funds from this class were used to register attendees as members of the Indiana Beekeepers Association.

Remember . . .Kathleen Prough, Indiana State Apiarist, will be at the April 9, 2015 meeting.  We meet every 2nd Thursday of the month at Hanover College in the Campus Center Board Room at 6:30PM.  www.IndianaHoney.org




 

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