Monthly Archives: February 2023

Join us for our February AABA Meeting! It will be held Tuesday, February 21st, 2023 from 6:30-8:40 PM at Arlington Echo.

6:30-6:50    Q and A, (too cold to do a hive dive).  Led by President Susan Beury 
6:50-7:00    Club Business
7:00-7:30    David Clark “First Spring Inspection”
Break for Social talk 7:30-7:40
7:40- 8:40   Main speaker  Pam Hepp “Spring management coming out of winter”

We will have our own David Clark showing us his Spring first inspection technique in pictures.  David has not shared this information since 2019 and it is definitely worth a revisit.

Our keynote speaker is Pam Hepp on “ Spring management coming out from winter”.  Pam is an EAS Masterbeekeeper.  Pam says ” I am a former high school chemistry teacher, turned beekeeper in 2013.  I had a student taking over hives from her sister and I wanted my tomatoes to produce more, so I got honeybees.  I was hooked immediately.  The bees are fascinating.  I try to help the bees help themselves.

I’ve been active with the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association – as their outreach coordinator, Vice President and President.  I helped develop and have been a teacher of the MCBA online “Short Course” – beginning beekeeping course.”

Join us for our January AABA Meeting! It will be held Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 from 6:30-8:30 PM at Arlington Echo.

Our agenda will be changed this month to allow Mr. Droege some extra time.

6:30 open Q and A with President Susan Beury
7:00-8:30 How to identify Native Bees Sam Droege.

We are thrilled to host Maryland native Sam Droege.

Sam Droege grew up in Hyattsville, received an undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland and a Master’s at the State University of New York – Syracuse. Most of his career has been spent at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird SurveySam Droge Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the Bioblitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs and worked on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs. Currently he is developing an inventory and monitoring program for native bees, online identification guides for North American bees at www.discoverlife.org, and with Jessica Zelt reviving the North American Bird Phenology Program.

As an aside, he is looking for volunteers interested in helping photoshop hi resolution photographs of insects…see http://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/ and can be contacted at sdroege@usgs.gov,. In November Phil Frank showed us this impressive system to get those highly detailed photographs.

https://www.discoverlife.org/pa/or/polistes/

How to Identify Native Bees

Maryland has roughly 450 species of native bees and about 65 bee genera. Identifying everything to species is something that very few scientists can do. However, there are bees that can be identified to group, genus, and even species using just your eyes or a pair of binoculars. So get ready to broaden your bee horizons with new information.

We saw from Phil Frank in November the care used by Sam Droege to document the various bees and our honey bees with his special camera system.

Now learn to identify our Maryland native bees!

Reminder: We are still looking for someone to shadow Kim Mehalick, current Program Coordinator, this year and then take over as Program Coordinator for the AABA club. If you are interested please speak to Susan Beury or Kim Mehalick.