Bill Lewis, CSBA President

For those of you who have not already set aside the week of Nov. 17-21, 2014 to attend the CSBA Annual Convention, please do so today! This year's 125th Annual Convention will be hosted by the Hyatt in Valencia, CA just north of Los Angeles with easy access to the I-5 freeway and very close to the Magic Mountain Theme Park and more for those familiar with the area. Please see the full-page ad at the bottom of this issue!

 We are expecting a large turn-out of attendees from all over CA and around the country. There should be plenty of interest to both those making their living keeping bees as well as a large contingent of urban beekeepers, especially from the over 1,000 members of bee associations in Los Angeles and vicinity. I encourage all attendees to spend the extra dollars to stay at the Hyatt. Avoid the hassle of the morning commute; share a room to get the cost down. I am interested in booking as many rooms as possible since our group earns 1 complimentary room for every 50 rooms booked. These complimentary rooms are used to house some of our speakers, which saves the CSBA the cost of these rooms. We are bringing in many speakers that will need these rooms so please book your room today! Convention information is being added daily to the CSBA website so check back often to get the latest updates on the program. There will be links to most of our speaker biographies.

Our September 4th CSBA board meeting is fast approaching. I encourage any CSBA member to attend these board meetings and get involved in supporting your organization. The CSBA Board of Directors is a core group of individuals that give up time out of their busy daily schedules to make the decisions that will better the beekeeping industry in CA. New blood is always welcome and encouraged. It is most important to share the burden in advancing the interests of CA beekeepers and beyond.

Work is being done to make almond orchards a safer place for bees. Your Board of Directors is working hard to communicate with almond growers and Pest Control Advisors (PCA's) to mitigate bee health problems that occurred last season during almond pollination and to avoid the same problems this coming pollination season. There will be a panel at the CSBA convention with representatives from the almond Industry, PCA's, and beekeepers affected by bee kills last year in almonds. The goal - finding a safer path for bees in almond pollination in 2015.

There are important meetings to attend to. Your CSBA President is planning to attend a follow-up meeting to the high level meeting held in Washington D.C. last March that resulted in a memorandum from President Obama in support of Honey Bee Health and Forage support systems. This USDA Forage and Nutrition Summit will also be in Washington D.C. in October. I believe Day 1 of the summit is open to the public. Day 2 will focus on working groups and will be limited to invited participants. This meeting will be followed by the 14th Annual North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) Conference. I expect a number of attendees at both these meetings will be in attendance at our CSBA Convention in November. I hope to get those attendees to regurgitate information gleaned from these meetings.

I have heard news of good honey harvests in the Dakotas and the Mid-West. I hope this translates to lots of $ being spent on auction items at the CSBA Convention in support of raising $ for bee research.

July was busy for PAm as Christi Heintz and Meg Ribotto met with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to give performance reports on two grants - BMP's for beekeepers and growers and building forage resources for honey bees. Both CDFA grant managers gave PAm an A+ on what we have accomplished to date!

This month we travel to Seattle to provide Costco with an update on the WSU Germplasm Repository, BIP Tech Transfer Teams and the PAm-Costco Scholar - 3 areas that PAm nurtured and in the case of the scholar, initiated with funding from Costco.

The PAm-Costco scholar is Laura Brutscher, a microbiology PhD student at the  Flenniken Bee Lab at Montanta State University. You may remember Dr. Michelle Flenniken. PAm sponsored her research in honey bees and she went on to dedicate her career to Apis mellifera. Now her student, Laura, is a bee researcher and is investigating how honey bees respond to interactions with pathogens i.e., viruses, bacteria, microsporidia and mites.

We are also helping to fund 2 other students, Kaira Wagoner (Olav Rueppell's lab at the University of NC-Greensboro) and Renata Borba (Marla Spivak's lab at the University of Minnesota).

You have to sit back and become awestruck by how PAm builds honey bee scientists!

 Meg Ribotto, PAm Outreach and Pollination Programs