Day 15: St. Marys Training

Went to a training all day today (9:30am-7:30pm) led by Tom about top-bar hive construction.
 Here is the meeting room Tom presented in:

We presented at one of the Beekeeper's Association's meetings in St. Mary's. Tom likes to give an introduction about himself first. I really like this approach becuase he gives his background and where he is coming from, especially regarding bees. It makes him a real person, and he references his own experience throughout his presentation. His style of teaching is very interactive with the audience, including doing hands-on construction. He gave a short presentation on top-bar hives and then we got started with building one. The wood they got for the training was a little warped and piecemeal, but Tom could look at it and know what to do. He has a great eye for looking at what can be done with different pieces of wood for building hives. We went outside to cut all the wood and nail it together.

Here is Tom showing that a piece of scrap wood can still be used for another piece of the hive (you can see the four faces already cut out on the table):

 Nailing pieces together for the bottom of the hive:

 We went inside afterwards for Tom's presentation about top-bar hive management. He used the hive they had just built for presenting.

Tom uses paper pictures of comb that he took stuck into bars for presenting. Tom had the audience show most of the hive:

I got a couple of good pictures of ackee from earlier (these are the ripe, opened fruit):

 

 

Flame of the Forest or colloquially "Donkey pee-pee" tree:

 

The Jerk place we ate at on the way back: