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.

Become A Member!

President's Message - July

A big round of applause for everyone who signed up to staff the NCBA booth during the Nevada County Fair! Both the club and the many county residents who count on us being there thank you. Public interest in honey bees is still so very high and one of the ways we can keep it high, at least on a local level is our booth at the fair.

I hope everyone who wanted to be there got a time slot, if not you'll have to be quicker to sign up next year. If you've never staffed the booth stop by and watch for a few minutes and don't be afraid to help out. You'll be surprised how easy it is. Members mostly give out honey samples and point out the queens. It really is a lot of fun and a great way to give a little back to the club.

Jerry Van Heeringen

Bee Bits - July

Following our massive rains, we’d hoped that we’d at least enjoy a huge honey. I don’t know about you, but in most of our yards, that didn’t happen. We actually needed to feed sugar syrup to hives in some yards during the blackberry flow in order to allow them to drawn necessary foundation (we of course will not extract any honey from those yards). One thing that I’m curious about now is whether the huge amount of swarming that occurred this spring will lead to a large amount of mite immigration later in the season from swarms that were able to establish feral colonies, in which varroa will build up to high levels.

I get a lot of calls from bee researchers around the world for help with projects. This week I’m shipping off sampled bees to Norway, for a grad student analyzing the genes for the production of vitellogenin. I’ll also be shipping frozen sampled queen cells and newly-emerged queens for the analysis of the differences in viruses between sick or lagging cells vs. healthy ones.

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Happy beekeeping!

Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com