Oct./Nov. 2026 Member Meeting
Join us on November 6, 2026 for our next member meeting. The meeting will be held at the St. Clair County Farm Bureau in Belleville. Doors open at 630, meeting begins at 7.
We will be welcoming speaker Peggy DeSanto via Zoom
| A little about me: I serve on the Board of Directors of the University of Minnesota Hobbyist Beekeepers Association. I’ve presented at the Wisconsin and Iowa Honey Producers Conferences and the Midwest Honeybee Expo. In 2022 I was awarded the University of Minnesota SARE Grant, and in 2023 the Hive Hugger won the American Beekeeping Federation’s Best Innovation Award.
The talk is called The Vented Hive vs. The Condensing Hive, and it challenges one of the most deeply held assumptions in modern beekeeping: that moisture is the enemy and that venting a hive in winter keeps bees alive. The research tells a very different story. Work by Etienne Tardif — a pioneering cold-climate beekeeper and researcher in Canada — along with the thermal dynamics research of Dr. Derek Mitchell at the University of Leeds, and the practical field work of Master Beekeeper Bill Hesbach and Dr. Tom Seeley’s studies of bees in their natural tree cavity environments, all point to the same conclusion: a well-insulated, sealed, condensing hive mimics what bees evolved to live in, and the results are dramatic. Beekeepers who make the shift to the condensing hive method report:
This is an educational talk, and your members will come away with an understanding of the latest research on the biology and thermodynamics of winter bee survival. |