by Mary Laura Fitzgerald

It is a new beekeeping year, and MSBA is proud to continue both offering its traditional agenda of meetings and classes, and to change things up a bit! Please consider taking a survey about MSBA meetings and how we can work better to meet your needs and expectations!

Our February 15 meeting will have a new format, with lunch on offer, and we are offering our first Beeswax Workshop on March 8. Our honey show champion beekeepers are also continuing to stock our website with recipes using local honey! If you haven't already, this is also a good time to register your colonies for the 2025 season, and consider a donation to the Apiary Inspection Fund.

Spring is soon springing, even though it hasn’t felt like it these past few weeks! We’ve been getting the odd warmish day here and there to assess the hives, and I’m hoping that yours have made it through so far!  

Sadly, it appears to have been a bad year for honey bee survival overall. The annual U.S. Beekeeping Survey indicates the highest colony losses since the 2010-11 beekeeping season (14 years!) when colony loss rates were first determined.

A team that includes Project Apis m and several USDA Bee Labs, American Beekeeping Federation, and the American Honey Producers Association, extension programs and beekeepers has been working to figure out exactly what is causing these high losses.  

I’m hoping they will have some useful findings from their work. In the meantime, we can get our bees through the upcoming starving months with supplemental feeding, and mite treatments when we have the opportunity.  

Spring is a time of optimism and renewal, a new chance and a new beginning. Some of us may be starting from a sad point, and some lessons learned.  Some may be listening to happy buzzing and planning for growth.  But either way, spring will be here before you know it, and bees will be brightening your world again.

[Return to February 2025 Beeline newsletter]