- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mussen, who retired in June after 38 years of service, will speak from 8:45 to 9:45 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 18 in the University Center on “Changes in Beekeeping Over Three Decades.” Mussen is a five-time president of WAS, an organization he helped found in 1977. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 1976.
The conference will take place in conjunction with the 2nd International Workshop on Hive and Bee Management, Sept. 17-21 and the Missoula Honey Harvest Festival, Sept. 20. The first-ever harvest festival is scheduled to be an annual event.
Theme of the WAS conference is “The Path of Discovery to the Future.” The daylong programs are Sept. 18 and 19. The WAS president is Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana who serves as the state director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DOE EPSCoR).
Sept. 17 is the 2nd International Workshop on Hive and Bee Monitoring, sponsored by WAS and the Bee Culture magazine. Jerry Hayes will discuss Monsanto research and scale hives, and Dick Rogers, Bayer CropScience research and scale hives. Other topics include wide-scale scientific experiments that can be conducted by beekeepers; interpreting hive weight and temperature; and acoustic scanning of bee pests, diseases, pesticides, molecular genetics for queen production.
The Sept. 18 WAS agenda includes such topics as honey bee health in Canada. bees in Northern Ireland; bee health and treatments; critical issues for bees and beekeeping; and bees and bee breeding in New Zealand. One of the speakers is virologist Michelle Flenniken of Montana State University; the former Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Davis. She will speak on "Honey Bee Virology and Diseases" from 11:15 to 11:45 a.m.
The Sept. 19 WAS agenda will include a keynote address, “Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Neonic Pesticides and the Prospects for Future Life on Planet Earth” by G. Philip Hughes, of the White House Writers' Group. Other talks will be a presentation on “Working Bees” by Randy Oliver of Scientific Beekeeping; critical issues for bees and beekeepers; adapting bee management to climate change; and honey producers.
The Western Apicultural Society is a non-profit, educational, beekeeping organization founded in 1978 for the benefit and enjoyment of all beekeepers in western North America.
Membership is open worldwide. However, the organization was designed specifically to meet the educational needs of beekeepers from the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon; and the states of northern Mexico.