Recap of the Bluegrass Beekeeping Conference

James and I will be the first ones to admit that we were not at all excited about the conference we attended last weekend. We drug our feet until the last day of registration and ended up only signing up because we felt like we owed it to our bees to learn as much as possible about making their lives easier. I mean, we did drag them across the state and shake them into a little box, where we force them to live and make honey, only for us to steal it away from them when they need it most.

We drug ourselves out to Frankfort at 8am for the beginning of the conference. We were in good company. We nibbled donuts and had tea (with honey - of course!) among about 400-500 other beekeepers. We perused the different vendor displays and tables full of honey and bee-related items. We even ran into our old pal, Buddy the Bee man, who taught us everything we knew about bee keeping.

After a while we all gathered for opening comments, led by Dr. Jeff Harris, Ph.D, who is a Apiculture Specialist at Mississippi State University. It was a brief presentation on the importance of honey bees and afterwards we all split up to go to our chosen breakout sessions.

You already know about the sessions I chose to attend - I am all hip to the buzz on different honey and beeswax products, but there were a ton of other selections. James chose to attend all bee management and pest control courses, so practical...

Some of the courses offered included a series of beginner's bee keeping classes, a course of different types of plants to provide forage for your bees, different types of hives, requeening and splitting hives, bee pheromones, beekeeping business courses, swarm prevention, and new technologies for modern beekeepers, among many others. There was so much to learn that there is no way, even with both of us, we would have seen and heard everything in one day.

After the 2 morning sessions we broke for a catered lunch and then attended two more sessions before closing. We learned so much in the day that we had definitely gotten our registration fee's worth of information.

The sessions were all taught by experts in the field. There was even a session on how to present beekeeping presentations to the public, which was led by the National Honey Princess! I didn't have the  opportunity to attend this session but it was right up my alley.

We ended up being pleasantly surprised by the overabundance of information we took away from the conference and all of the nice people we met while we were there. We got to see a little glimpse of other apiaries when we chatted with the other beekeepers. We would talk to someone who had 3 hives, then turn around and talk to someone who had 200. We definitely have a lot more to learn and we won't be dragging our feet to register next year. I am actually looking forward to the next conference! I wonder if they would let me decorate a hive for auction... or present a session on blogging about bees?