March Meeting 3/21/24 to feature Dan Conlon as guest speaker

The Bennington Beekeepers' Club is glad to announce that our March meeting, hosting Dan Conlon of Warm Colors Apiary, will take place Thursday, March 21, from 6:30--9:00 p.m., in the Rotary Room of the Bennington Free Library. The library is located at 101 Silver Street in Bennington, and on-street parking is available.

Our guest speaker this month will be Dan Conlon, a commercial beekeeper in western Massachusetts who, together with his wife Bonita, runs Warm Colors Apiary. Warm Colors specializes in Russian Queens and spring Nucs as members of the Russian Honeybee Breeders Association, and was founded in 2000 to produce regional honey from flowers on its eighty acres of woodland, open fields, and wetlands. Warm Colors' mission is to develop, test, and use beekeeping methods that improve the health of the honeybee. Through selective breeding, they endeavor to create and manage a sustainable apiary system that minimizes the use of harmful chemicals and employs the natural defenses an heritable behaviors shown to improve the honeybee's mite tolerance and resistance to disease. For more information on Warm Colors Apiary, please see their website ( https://www.warmcolorsapiary.com/ ). The title of Thursday's presentation will be 'Honeybee Health and Genetic Selection: Defensive Mechanisms of Honeybees', and it will describe and review Warm Colors' strategy for keeping healthy colonies, improving Queen resistance to disease and pests, as well as suggest management strategies that helps bees. Emphasis will also be placed on how this works for the Russian Breeders' Association. We are fortunate to host Dan, and hope that you will come listen to his talk with us, where beekeepers of all levels will learn.

The meeting will consist of a potluck and chat from 6:30--7:00, a business meeting from 7:00--7:30, and the talk by Dan Conlon will follow until the raffle commences at 8:45. Donated items will be welcome. For details, please see the attached agenda.

In hopes of seeing you next Thursday---
Erin Kiley