York County Beekeepers Association

Master Beekeeper Karen Thurlow joined our December 2021 meeting and presented on ‘Products from the Hive’. Karen shared her knowledge on ways to generate income from your hobby bees by producing bees, queens, nucs, honey, and beeswax products for sale. She shared recipes for producing creamed honey, and beeswax products including lip balms and lotions. Download Karen’s Recipes (PDF)

YCBA’s participation at the Action Fair has included a display of vintage beekeeping equipment, an observation hive with ‘I found the Queen’ stickers, and informal walk-ups to ‘Ask a Beekeeper’. Recently there is growing interest in showing local honey and products from the hive and in 2021 YCBA members submitted a range of ‘light’, ‘medium’, and ‘dark’ honeys along with a variety of beeswax products for judging. Cash awards and ribbons were won by Joe Barberi, Lynne Gobeil, Beth Goodwin,

YCBA Swag! York County Beekeeper T-shirts and hat sales will return in 2022. Like the 2020 sale, this will probably be pre-order and pre-pay. Please stay tuned for updates including information on how to place an order.

Open Hive Session July 17. Place:  Home of Lynne Gobeil, 11 Cook Lane, Kennebunk (lgobeil@twc.com) Guest :  Jennifer Lund Maine State Apiarist will lead the session Click here for photo slide show

Karen Thurlow, Master Beekeeper, formerly of New Moon Apiaries in Yarmouth, Maine, now living in New Brunswick, Canada spoke on Spring Management. Karen believes you cannot “beekeep” by the calendar but need to know the phenology (nature’s calendar) where your bees are kept. Pollen is essential for brood rearing and if natural pollen isn’t available, say it rains for a week, then pollen substitute in the hive would help keep the bees and brood alive. Keeping track, every year, of

Erin McGregor-Forbes, EAS Certified Master Beekeeper, Co-owner of Overland Apiaries and Director of Finance and Administration at Maine Audubon Society, spoke at the February 8, 2021 meeting on bee health, sustainability and the Sentinel Apiary Program through Bee Informed Partnership. Maine has a Pollinator Protection Plan which was put in place in 2017.  Maine is ideal for beekeeping with diverse ecosystems, forage, good land and environmental management and clean water, but parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi, pesticides, climate change and genetic

Carol Cottrill, Master Beekeeper and newly retired Secretary of EAS, spoke at the December 14, 2020 meeting on preparing and making products from beeswax. Prior to this meeting Carol supplied a PDF of her product recipes with a list of suppliers of oils and packaging. These recipes look easy to do. I hope you all will give it a try. Some properties of beeswax are 1) it is insoluble in water and having a density of 0.95, floats; 2) it