Welcome

The Nevada County Beekeepers Association is a diverse group of professionals and hobbiest, men and women, young and old, with a keen interest in promoting the well being of honey bees and their habitat while enjoying their amazing benefits. The NCBA strives to promote education on beekeeping and agriculture by providing the latest news and techniques in these fields.

The club members meet once a month on the first Monday at 7pm and visitors are always welcome. All meetings are held in the Veterans Memorial Building at 255 South Auburn Street, Grass Valley, CA. Entrance is off the back parking lot, in Grass Valley at 7pm. The August meeting is always moved to the County Fair Grounds with a fair booth clean up following by a barbeque social.

Any questions about bees?
Always wanted to get bees?
Questions about honey production?
Have some information to share?
Wondering about pollination in your garden or orchard?
Have some bees or equipment to sell?
Want to meet some great folks?

Join our lively question and answer session starting promptly at 7pm followed by refreshements, brief business discussion, raffle and a great program.

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President's Message - September

I know what you're thinking, who has a meeting on Labor Day? Nevada County Beekeepers Association does. Since the August meeting is for fair booth cleanup and BBQ, and the difficulty in both finding another date the Vet's Hall is available and getting the word out to everyone, we just keep the date. I'll be there and I hope you will too.

I'd like us all to give special thanks to Eric Oliver for installing, maintaining and later removing the bees from the observation hives in the fair booth. Thanks also to Brion and Randy for assembling the demonstration booth, giving the demonstrations, taking it all down and putting it safely away until next year. Leslie Gault did a great job of arranging the BBQ and scheduling fair booth staff, Thank you Leslie. Rob Slay has been our Fair Booth Coordinator for the past couple of years and deserves our gratitude as well. Last but not least, thank you to all the volunteers who staffed the booth!

After a year as vice president and now four years as president I will not be continuing to hold office next year. Please consider yourself for the office of president or vice president. Our club needs people to step up and volunteer, the current officers and board members have been in place for a long time and we need some new blood. You don't have commit to four years, just one. I would hate to see the NCBA fade away due to lack of participation.

Jerry Van Heeringen

Bee Bits - September

As I’ve written before, we are engaged in a serious selective breeding program for bees that are naturally resistant to the varroa mite. To that end, we are in the middle of performing several hundred follow-up mite washes on potential breeder queens – whose colonies exhibited very low mite counts back in early July. To our great delight, we are finding a number of hives still showing very low mite levels.

Of particular interest is that this season we kept track of the maternal lines of the queen cells used to start the nucs in each of our 50-some apiaries. As we took mite counts last week (late August), it was apparent that a few yards exhibited a far greater proportion of colonies with very low mite levels, compared to the rest of the yards. So Eric and I went back to our grafting log book to see whether there was any correlation between those yards and any particular queen mothers. Our jaws dropped when we saw that all of those yards had two breeder queen mothers in common (out of the 25 or so breeders that we’d grafted from). You can only imagine how exciting this is! If those low counts continue to hold up, this may allow us to zero in on the genetics that allow bees to fight back against the mite.

...see full article in the current Newsletter

Happy beekeeping!

Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com