Reflections on Bee School 2020

As I've had some time to reflect and listen to some feedback, I thought I'd write some of my thoughts. There are a lot of atta-boys, and while it feels good, it was and always is a team effort. I won't specifically name names, I'd miss someone. Speakers made prepartions, displays were set up, a bunch of people came out to pre cut 80 nuc boxes, the grass was mowed and the grounds cleaned up. Cars were parked, people checked in, food set up and cleaned up. So many jobs but with so many people, things went smoothly and to the participants it looked like we knew what we were doing. And I can't say thank you enough. So far the only negative thing has been the bottle neck at the building station. We were short a builder, Kirk was sick and could not attend, and we certainly missed him. I also misjudged how long it would take to assemble. In the future I think we'll assemble at least half of the frames before the school and set up twice as many nuc stations. While I'd like to have more vendors, it might be difficult to attract them as we can't handle many more people than we had. The crux of our bee school is focused on first and second year beekeepers so I really don't see us changing the content. Perhaps if some groundbreaking discovery comes up we'll certainly cover that but the primary focus is to help new beekeepers keep their bees alive for more than 1 year.  It was a wonderful time, made possible by both staff and participants. An opportunity to meet new people and make new friends. Here's to lasting beekeeping friendships.