May 17th, 2022 AABA Meeting

AABA May Meeting

Arlington Echo Nature Center Millersville MD

6:30 Hive dive and/or general Q and A discussion
***Please bring your veil and protective gear if you are going on the hive dive. This will be weather dependent. There will always be beekeepers in the room to answer your questions.

7:00 Candee Van Iderstine: Practical tips for making your hive inspections easier
A wonderful walk through various tools and hacks that work to make your beekeeping work more enjoyable and easier

7:30 David Dobbs: Shaking Bees: Why and How it’s done

Dave recently had the experience of shaking over 175 hives making 184, 3 lb packages with a commercial beekeeper. The video and pictures are from April 15th at Larriland Farm Mt Airy Maryland. Dave will show a video and walk us through the process and business side of this all day event.

Dave Dobbs

Dave has been a beekeeper for 7 years. Having flower and vegetable gardens prompted him to get into beekeeping for the pollination qualities.

After seeing an “undertaker Bee” throw a dead bee off the bottom board – Dave was hooked on the intricacies of honey bee biology and their social interactions.

He expanded his apiary to 8 colonies his second year and started producing honey and candles for sale. Being an equipment geek, Dave used his proceeds and started purchasing larger production extraction equipment and now has a “Honey House” with a full sideliner set up. He expanded to twelve colonies the next year and since then has had as many as 20.

Already having an LLC for his Cyber Security Consulting company called Baltimore Information Group (BIG), he expanded into another division calling it BIG Bee Apiary.

A lifetime teacher, Dave has shared what he knows about bees including: teaching a Life Science Course and starting bee colonies at a Montessori School, using his bee business as the case study for the Entrepreneur 101 course at AACC, supports 2-3 outreach events a year and submits 6-7 products to be judged at the Howard County Fair.

He also enjoys queen rearing, splitting, and collecting pollen. This year, he has a local scientific study determining active dates of the local honey flow of Western Howard County region using a procedure in Bee Culture Magazine. In addition, he is a member of the Howard County “Bee City Pollination Committee”, which supports the education and hands-on discussion of honey bee pollination in the county. He has a registered “Pollinator Garden” on his property and continues to expand it every year.

Dave has been very active in the Howard County Beekeepers Association starting with establishing the t-shirt committee, hosting bait box builds, mentoring 3-5 newbees every year, is the out-yard coordinator, has been Vice President and currently sits on the Board of Directors as Past President. Dave is currently working on becoming a Maryland Certified Honey Judge and is a candidate for the EAS Master Beekeeper certification having passed 2 of the 4 exams at last year’s convention.