Taking the Metro Short Course brings a wealth of bee knowledge. The presenters are people like Jennifer Berry (who writes a monthly article for Bee Culture and manages the apiary at UGA), Keith Fielder (Georgia Master Beekeeper and field agent), Cindy Bee, Curtis Gentry (author of the Peace Corps guide to building top bar hives) and many others.
In addition, the participants go home with a goody bag full of bee "goodies." Some of what is in the bag is in the photo above. I'm in charge of the Goody Bags this year - it's my third time doing this job.
The goodies include more than is in the picture. In the picture you see the bag, a jar of honey, a tube of lip balm, a CD with PDFs of the presentations of each of the presenters, a copy of First Lessons in Beekeeping by Keith Delaplane, a copy of ABJ, various bee catalogs, pamphlets from the National Honey Board. In addition, we'll add to this tomorrow a copy of Bee Culture, a list of regional bee suppliers who sell nucs and packages, a resource list of Internet connections, a handmade candle, and a couple of other things.
These items have occupied one side of my sun porch all the fall. I will be so glad to give them away on Saturday!
I was also in charge of burning the CDs and making the @$%^#$^ labels for them. That is a job I never want to do again. It's difficult to gather all the PDFs of the presentations and I found making the labels beyond challenging.
The program that came with the labels taught how to calibrate the printer, which I did so that it printed perfectly on the model. Then on the actual label, the printer often pulled the paper in incorrectly and I threw away almost as many labels as I actually used. Never again.
NOTE: If you're counting, this is my 800th post on this blog!
