Foothills Learning Center
The TVBC has partnered with the Foothills Learning Center to provide educational opportunities about the Apis mellifera (honey bees) for the public. We have a bee yard on the grounds used for the Honey Bee Apprentice Program taught each year for new beekeepers. Please visit their website for all classes available at the Foothills Learning Center.
The winter of 2023-2024 was a tough one for our FLC Apiary. We lost all of our hives there and due to a change in personnel, the bee yard fell into a state needing some TLC. On Saturday, March 30, after the OSU Apprentice Beekeeper class, several mentors and student embarked on a work party at the FLC. Jeff Bergland was joined by Ben Lafon, Bill Terry, Terry Fackrell, Katherin Montgomery, Paula Spratt, Jim McMahon and Robert Fisher. They spent around two hours at the Foothills Learning Center cleaning. All of the hives had a lot of bridge comb, propolis, and Burr comb that made it very hard and difficult to break the frames apart. One hive had a mouse living in it with a nest that was cleaned out. There was lots of mouse poop, wax moth damage, and still some honey lift on many of the frames. There were no dead bees on the bottom boards of any of the hives and only a few bees on a couple of frames that had died. After getting all of those frames cleaned up, the team turned their attention to the storage building which is shown in some of the pictures below. The team emptied all of the equipment out of the shed. Some of it had wax moth damage, but most of it was covered in mouse poop. It was all cleaned and replaced. Our next goal will be to repopulate the apiary with bees. More to come on that...Here are some pictures from the March work party.