This year’s 46^th Apimondia International Apicultural Congress – APIMONDIA 2019 MONTRÉAL – begins September 8 in Montréal, Canada. This is the big bi-annual beekeepers’ and bee researchers’ bash. I’m hoping that many of the readers of this blog will be able to make it. Since most of you are in Canada and the USA, airfare should be less than most Apimondia events, yet the French- (and English-) speaking city of Montréal is exotic enough to make you feel like you’ve left Kansas.

People attend Apimondia to check out new beekeeping tools and toys and to catch up on research. You’ll hear a range of presentations – genomics, pesticides, pollinator news, honey fraud, bee breeding, and stuff you can’t even imagine.  The Apicultural Congress is also a great opportunity to meet old friends and make some new ones.

I’ll be there. I’m doing research work at the University of Calgary in bee ecology. I submitted two abstracts and both were accepted. My oral presentation considers the difficulty in determining the foraging distances of honey bees, bumble bees, and leafcutter bees. My paper, Foraging distances of commercially deployed bees: a meta-analysis, draws on hundreds of studies and examines the typical range that these bees fly while gathering resources, with the intent of helping land managers determine optimal pollination while avoiding commercial pollinator spillover into natural areas where other bee species might be impacted.

I’ll also have a poster on quite a different topic, Demographic and socio-economic influences of urban beekeeping. This is a study of the types of urban people who become beekeepers. Are they typically wealthy or poor? Family guys or bachelorettes? Do they usually hold doctorates in metaphysics or (like my father, who was a beekeeper) a Grade-Eight primary-school certificate? As you know, it takes a diverse village to raise a hive of bees, but some groups are more likely to be beekeepers, at least in a big city. You’ll see what I mean if you drop by and see my poster. By the way, I’ll be assigned a time that I’m supposed to stay close to my poster and that will be a good opportunity to catch me and say hello. I’ll post the schedule and poster location when I’m given the information.

Jardin Botanique Montréal – Montréal’s Botanical Gardens