Article in Sydney Daily Telegraph.  Please note I am not endorsing this, merely reporting it

Details available here

For information, here is a report from one of the hive inspections of the day.

There are also a number of reports from the Steering visits on the mentoring page (members tab).

The club has a Flow hive at the Saxon St site.  I have an electronic hive scale attached and I thought you might be interested to see the data.  Not much nectar coming in at present - Melbourne weather! (although there was a good week Jan 5-12)

Meetings in 2017 will be in the Performance Centre at the Doncaster Secondary College. The address is 123 Church Rd, Doncaster 3108 (Melway map: 33 G12).

Our Flow hive at Saxon St now has nectar in 4 of the 6 Flow frames.  A second brood box has been added to provide room for the expanding colony.

The company has now donated us a full hive kit with pitched roof to complement the Flow super and we need some volunteers to assist in assembling and painting this.

We have now received the set of 18 prepared Apis mellifera microscope slides from America. This valuable resource includes sections of the head and mouthparts, legs, wings and sting as well as details of queen ovaries and drone testis.  In addition smears of Nosema and Bacillus larvae (AFB) are included which will assist in identifying these diseases.

These slides will be available for study at the microscopy workshop and will be presented at a future club meeting.  Example images can be seen on the information/microscopy page on this website.

Today we used the new dissection microscope for the first time at the inaugural junior club meeting.  Here's a sample photo - I haven't quite mastered the camera focus and I was being "assisted" by some very young beekeepers, so not the best of images, but it was fantastic - wireless streaming the pictures to everyone's smartphones and tablets!  We anesthetised the bees by putting them in the freezer for 3 min - no bees died for the cause.

A packed audience attended at the Templestowe College venue. Trevor Weatherhead from AHBIC presented a comprehensive and highly informative account of the current Varroa jacobsoni incursion and the measures being taken to control it.

At the AGM on 21/7/16 the following committee were elected.

President: Don Muir

Vice President: Mat Lumalasi

Secretary: Andrew Wootton

Treasurer: Yvonne Ashby

Members: Helmut Huber, Demi Lagos, Ralph Lynch, Laura Paris and Alan Walton