A glorious day at The Grange in Richmond and a good member turnout for the 2008 Harvest Dinner - prepared excellently by Bertha Tanner and the Grange staff. Dinner was served at 5.30pm and as usual everybody ate well. The Johnnycakes remain State Champions.
After dinner we had a very short members meeting, with a quick check for any business, and an announcement of the Honey Contest and Silent Auction winners. The auction successes are too numerous to mention but the honey contest was won by the following:

Light honey

• 1 Tony DiGuilio
• 2 Alison Davies
• 3 Jeff Mcguire

Medium

• 1 Jeff Mcguire
• 2 Gary Slater
• 3 Sue Chien

Dark

• 1 Tony DiGuilio
• 2 Jeff Mcguire
• 3 Clare Stone.

The judges were Jason Kerr, Jeff McGuire and Bill Jones.

The highlights of the evening were sessions with Jeff Pettis and Kim Flottum. Kim talked about EAS next year in which the theme is "Moving towards chemical-free beekeeping".  A great subject, and it was noted that the speakers will tend to be beekeepers rather than researchers. Jeff talked at length - and answered questions - about the current research into CCD. 

This newsletter is not a complete account of the discussion but some of the things mentioned were a noticeable effect shown by one of the common in-hive treatments. He showed data that bees exposed to the pesticide - in a lab environment - had four times the nosema than those not exposed. He also said that they looked at some old samples from 1985, and found that 30% of these bees were infected with nosema ceranae, indicating that  this isn't a new strain. Using the treatments is really - and just one way to keep bees - but that it is entirely possible to keep bees without them, let the weak die off, and work with the survivors.  He suggested that this works better if you start with a number of colonies.

Jeff and Kim had driven south from WCBA where they had also spoken that day. I know that several members there took videos of the talk and I will try to obtain links to them for our website.