Beekeeper Learning Circles

View the project final report

Commodities

• Animals: bees
• Animal Products: honey

Practices

• Crop Production: beekeeping
• Education and Training: technical assistance
• Farm Business Management: market readiness
• Sustainable Communities: social networks

Local bee clubs can never accommodate all the topics its members want, especially the ones that require time- and resource-intensive topics such as queen rearing, splits, and cut outs and swarms. Monthly meetings are constrained with time of day, length of meeting, indoor settings and attendance by mixed levels of prior connections and experience. By producing Learning Circle field days and monthly maintenance calls, Iowa beekeepers will get the learning they want and the partners will get to efficiently teach their special skills without the worry of administrative tasks that organizing a field day requires.

Field day topics were chosen to increase the sustainability of beekeeping: splits prevent lost swarms while continuing genetic preferences, queen rearing combats the high cost of time-sensitive requeening while also continuing genetic preferences or introducing diversity, cut outs and swarms fight chemical bee removals and improve community safety while increasing genetic diversity. Field days and Zoom calls will increase social sustainability, too.

Lastly, learning circles can include the many learners who do not have club memberships.

The learning circle model will span one year with 12 monthly Zoom meetings, three in-person field days, a culminating event, and storytelling to promote the learning circle model in the future and cement the experience for participants. This project is for beekeepers interested in learning about topics that require more time than a monthly club meeting, but not so much time that a person couldn’t travel there and back in a day.