Wyoming Bee College Pre-Conference Workshops

Location: Cheyenne, WY
Date: Friday, March 22

Is offering a choice of four all day educational options:

  • Expand on your current beekeeping skills with the MN Bee Squad

  • Consider raising queen bees with Dr. Tom Repas

  • The hive as a medicine chest with Apitherapy

  • Use the hive’s other products to create crafts to gift, keep, or sell in Bees Wax Alchemy

Cost of the workshop by itself is $125/person.

Wyoming Bee College – Conference and Events (https://wyomingbeecollege.org/)

Location: Cheyenne, WY
Date: Saturday, March 23 – Sunday, March 24

Open to everyone interested in bees, beekeeping or gardening for bees. We are pleased to offer three great keynote speakers to keep you inspired with bees and beekeeping! The Bee College offers five (5) tracks on day one including beginner basic beekeeping and four (4) tracks on the second day, in addition to 3 keynote speakers.

Cost of the conference is still $85 and includes, lunches, dinner, snacks, coffee and tea. You can sign up for a package deal of both pre-conference workshop and main conference for $195. Bee Buddies, kids 7-15, are free with a paying adult.

Wyoming Bee College – Descriptions of Events

Wyoming Bee College first keynote speaker is “Hilary Kearney, author of Queen Spotting and the creator of Girl Next Door Honey”, a beekeeping business that offers educational opportunities to hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She maintains the blog Beekeeping like-A-Girl and her writing on bees has appeared in Modern Farmer and Grit magazines. Her work has been the subject of features in Huffington Post, Vogue, Mother Earth News, and other outlets. She rescues wild bee colonies and manages around 60 hives in her hometown of San Diego, California.

The Wyoming Bee College Saturday evening speaker: Tammy Horn Potter PhD grew up on a farm, but was determined never to do science, agriculture or math when she went to college. An English professor by training, Potter decided to help her grandfather with his bees in 1997 and immediately became smitten with them. Balancing her career as an English professor and hobbyist, Potter wrote Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation, which was published by University Press of KY in 2005. Potter followed Bees in America with a second book, Beeconomy: What Women and Bees teach us about Local Trade and Global Markets in 2012. In order to write it, she went to Hawaii during off-seasons from 2006-2010 to work in the queen bee production industry. In 2014, Potter became the KY State Apiarist. Her primary goals as apiarist are to document hive health, promote economic development, and provide education and outreach.

The Wyoming Bee College Sunday morning speaker, all the way from England; Timothy Baker. In 2008, Tim introduced bees to the school after a swarm appeared on the school grounds. Through this he was able to include bees throughout the curriculum and run a successful after school club as well as producing honey for the school shop.

The bees have become an important and integral part of the school, allowing children close observation and increasing understanding of their behavior. This in turn has led children to a growing confidence around bees.

With two other members of school staff, he has formed a charity called Roots4Life. The aim of this charity is to provide access to cooking, food growing and nutritional knowledge.

Tim Baker is Head teacher of Charlton Manor Primary School, Greenwich, England for 14 years. He is a board member of the School Food Plan Alliance, National Childhood Measurement Program and the Royal Horticultural Society Education Committee. He is a Fellow of the National Association of Environmental Education.

Tim serves on the London Food Board and is a member of the London Obesity Taskforce. Childhood obesity is rising at an alarming rate. Tim believes it is crucial to reverse this and includes gardening and cooking very much throughout the curriculum. Children have hugely benefited from this as they have developed cooking skills and can make the right choices when it comes to diet.

Tim also uses cooking and gardening as activities for encouraging community engagement and parents as well as the local community are frequently supporting the school in these areas.

More Wyoming Bee College Events:

Beekeeping 101.  An all-day workshop learning the basics of beekeeping from a local third generation Master Beekeeper, Carolyn Nyarady DVM. This class will cover bee biology, disease identification, and seasonal care of your bees, what bees need when there are no flowers, hive designs, equipment needs and costs.  This class will get you started with the craft of beekeeping.

Beekeeping 102 years 2 and 3.  “What I wish I had known, but didn’t even know what I didn’t know” –wow! A discussion on details to help you with your bees.  This track will cover in-depth views of dealing with bees that are ready to swarm, splitting hives, and varroa mites, plus much more.

Journeyman level two tracks of choice:  Years 4 and on. Topics are husband your bees, Bee nutrition, just what am I looking at?  The Girl Next Door Honey business model, your bees survived winter – now what? Preparation is everything, Mead making short course- the basement brewer and much more.

Gardening for bees – don’t have much of a green thumb, but want to feed hungry bees learn gardening basics, then move on to Rocky Mountain Hardy flowering plants and be the envy of the neighbors with basic landscape design, followed by hands on build a bee hotel.

Day two keeps building on what you learned: Hive inspections, finding and installing packages of bees, honey extraction, beekeeping in schools, bees for pollination service, swarms and more.

Get more information or Enroll at https://wyomingbeecollege.org/