Thursday, April 18th, 2024 at 6:00PM (EST)
This is a free event with donations optional. All proceeds go toward beekeeper education, future speaker events, and further development and outreach efforts of the SBGMI. This event will be recorded and available to subscribing SBGMI members for a brief time.
Two key factors that contribute to determining if a season is successful for US beekeepers are the levels of varroa mites and the survival and productivity of queen bees. Consequences of inadequate mite management are known, but less clear are the economic impacts of management decisions made about queens.
In recent years, beekeepers have expressed concerns about queen longevity with issues surrounding increasing supersedure and failure rates. Uncertainty about how long queens live leads to uncertainty in making the right decisions in queen management. Many beekeepers aim to follow the practice of replacing all their queens each year to maintain young, productive queens. However, the economic impact of this decision is not always known. This talk will cover a project focused on the requeening decisions of one beekeeper and put economic values on those decisions.
Katie Lee, PhD. is the University of Minnesota Apiculture Extension Educator and MN Co-coordinator for the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant program. Katie received a MS and PhD specializing in honey bees. She traveled the U.S. assessing beekeeper colonies, and kept >200 colonies for a project on the benefits of pollinator plantings. Katie currently works with the UMN Bee Lab on developing beekeeper education and does a bit of practical research.