Thank you Richard for your presentation at Wednesdays Club meeting. Your talk on grafting queens was so very well presented and packed with information and how to’s. Thank you for bringing in all the equipment and tools to show us how it is done. An amazing evening.

Grafting tool

Linda Cremer gave a fantastic talk on a couple of plants she wanted to showcase this month. She did a wonderful job. Thank you so much Linda for entertaining us as well as being very informative. She has graciously given me her notes which I will post below for anyone who was mot able to attend the meeting.

A big thank you to everyone who came to help us celebrate on Wednesday for the Clubs 10th Anniversary. The club was formed back in 2014 and we were privileged to have a few founding members there that night, including Peter McNab who journeyed down from Whangarei especially. Peter took to the mic and told us how the formation of the club came into being all those years ago. Several other members took the floor and regaled us with a few bee stories.

Scott and Sharon provided us with a delicious buffet. The ham and beef were to die for. Thank you Jo for arranging the raffle. Thank you so much to everyone who helped in making the evening a most enjoyable night – I hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years to do it all over again…..

Our Speaker this month was The President of the Auckland Beekeepers Club, Ken Brown.

His enthusiasm and humour was amazing and very entertaining. He covered so many aspects of beekeeping from equipment, book reviews, food and behavior, as well as demonstrating a range of gismos and gadgets that he brought along.

As for the samples of chocolate from his wife, Sandra, well what can I say…………YUM!

Thank you Ken

Thank you to our lovely members for turning out this morning to clean our club equipment.

Ian and John also gave demonstrations on applying wax to foundation with a roller and dipping.

As always Jo and Bruce provided a much welcome bite to eat. Thank you all.

How fortunate we were last Wednesday at the Club meeting to have a speaker from Sri Lanka explain the main differences in beekeeping between New Zealand and his home country. His talk was captivating and helped by Jo, whos fabulous work with the slide show, made for a very entertaining evening. As interesting as it was I think I will stick to the NZ way!!

Well done to everyone who helped extracting the honey from the club hives last weekend. I believe the grand total was 6 1/2 buckets. Thanks to Ian for all your hard work and Jo and Bruce for the lovely BBQ.

A lovely time was had by all at the Helensville A&P Show, even the weather could not have been any better. Gillian did an amazing job showing the live hive frames to passers by. Who by the way had be rounded up by the ever amazing Jo. Thanks to everyone for your help not only for the day but for helping set everything up. Scott also brought two frames of bees from home for the observation hive. Jo and myself also indulged our inner child and had a craft stall running at the back making bee brooches and tissue flowers.

After a lovely Christmas break it was back to business with the hives at 1333 Old North Road.

All four hives are doing well and the bees are very busy bringing in lots of honey.

A small turn out but was expected as a long weekend but it didn’t stop us having fun and enjoying lovely BBQ thanks to Jo and Bruce.

A fantastic talk on splitting hives was held at last Wednesdays club meeting. A big thank you to Kim and Ian.