President's Message

Greetings,
As with all domestic livestock, parasites pose a continuous threat in production agriculture. Honeybees are no exception. It didn't used to be that way back in the "good ol’ days". My father would tell me stories of my grandfather having honeybee colonies back in the 1940s and 50s where he would put a few hives down in the pasture and simply collect the honey at the end of the summer.  Those were easy days for raising bees and producing honey, when everyone planted sweet clover and alfalfa for hay, there were plenty of fence lines to grow wildflowers, thick patches of goldenrod, and no parasites. Well, those days don’t exist anymore. We may still have a few patches of sweet clover and alfalfa, a few fence lines, and goldenrod only where mono crop agriculture doesn’t exist. But now, we have parasites affecting honeybee production, and it's a problem. More...