FEATURED SPEAKER: ZAC LAMAS

TOPIC: Summer Prep for Winter Success

BIO:

Zachary Lamas is a PhD student in the vanEngelsdorp Lab at the University of Maryland. Zach’s background includes managing honey production and nucleus colonies with Mike Palmer, and his own queen and nuc businesses in New York and North Carolina. He is also establishing a new nuc and queen operation here. He has taught in Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba, and has given talks to the American Beekeeping Foundation. Come learn about queens and how to get your colonies to the queen right position that will help them thrive.

ZAC SAYS:

• Colonies with preexisting conditions aren't going to do well during a period of stress- i.e. winter. So let's take care of everything in our control during the midsummer- while time and warm weather are still a resource we still have- mites, queens, nutrition, body cavity.
• We want to actively and effectively manage our varroa. This means not waiting until our worker bee and brood population are damaged before we react. We want to think of it this way- the damage we see is actually caused several reproductive cycles prior.
• Time is a resource. In our apiaries we requeen way before the fall. Often queens with issues are not producing a lot of bees. Why wait until just before winter to requeen? Requeen so the new queen has a lot of time to build up a huge winter population!*Feed- Honey in the comb where the bees can have access during cold snaps is what we want. Let's talk about efficient feeding!