Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I went to a scout meeting tonight and spoke about scout beekeeping. The interest was great and over half raised their hands, including the adults, when I asked if they might be interested in learning to keep. Hopefully, by spring I will have a half dozen or more new, young beeks, and a few parents.

I think it is great the Boy Scouts are interested. I would like to do the same for my son's troop. How do we get the BSA to reactivate the merit badge? Of course it can be done without official credit but it would be nice for the boys to get credit for all the hard work.

Sadly myself and numerous others have tried everything over the last 4 years , national have no interest. .. yet we have some totally useless Merit badges still in the program that appeal to very very few kids. From the growth of Beekeeping , urban and rural , I would like to believe that 80% of troops could find a local bee keeper to help them.

My troop and I chose to go ahead and do the full Merit Badge as set out in the last book , published in 1982 , I then rewrote the manual bringing it up to date.

I had it published on my own with a limited run of 50 books , so far we have either sold or given away about 46 of those .

So if interested - I am willing to send you one book and the worksheet I created , plus you can read the Blog where I promote our Program. If enough interest I can publish a second run of books.

As the Scout Software still has Beekeeping in the list - we awarded it and I have had badges even made up - it will never qualify as an official Merit badge but our Boys knew that going in.
9 boys and 4 leaders participated , 2 boys have completed all requirements , 6 only have one item left, and 4 families started keeping bees in our Troop as a result of the program... success beyond my dreams.

Rick
336 two 09- nine eight 94

http://scoutbee107.blogspot.com/

Jack and Dylan finished up all their requirements for the merit badge and thus have earned the Bee Keeping Merit Badge.

Congrats

We opened up the hive for an inspection, while we did not pull the whole hive apart, we did get down into the brood area and see newly laid eggs and while stores are a bit low the bees are bringing in nectar and pollen, so OK for now. We saw a few small hive beatles, no verroa in the drone brood - which is great news - and good solid activity in all 4 boxes of bees, stores are a little low compared to last time, so bees were eating a bunch while the bad weather endured, but now we are on warm to hot forecasts so will replenish soon

Joe took a number of photo's , so we will see those up here soon.

Congrats to Dylan and Jack - bringing the number of boys who completed all tasks and thus earning Bee Keeper Merit Badge to 4 out of the 9 who started. I know of three more who will probably also complete theirs in near future.

Looking to be a good season, lets all be involved and come out.