Contributed by Dewey Caron

How much surplus honey have your bees stored this year? Our active storage season is over or about over by this time. I hope you are thinking about exhibiting your honey in the State Fair Honey Show (deadline online August 7^th). At the very least plan to enter your honey in the annual OSBA Seaside meeting (entries due first day of conference, November 7^th). Could your honey garner ribbons at both?? Think of the bragging rights!!!

The State Fair Honey Show has been extensively revamped this year. Honey and Products of the Bee Hive is now a separate division of the Fair. We have been able to get the judging standards and the entry categories modernized. See the State Fair Exhibitor handbook for details (www.oregonstatefair.org).

The Honey show will have 4 divisions of Beekeeping photographs (3 classes), Beeswax (4 classes), Extracted Honey (3 color classes – 3 pint or pound jars per entry), and a class of other Honey (5 classes comb/cut-comb/chunk/creamed/extracting frame),  There is no entry fee. Ribbons (1^st, 2^nd & 3^rd) for each class. Two entry levels — A. Youth (17 and under) and B. Oregon adult beekeeper.

Entries must be entered ONLINE by August 7.

As a convenience for Southern Oregon beekeepers, Honey show entries will be accepted at

• the Medford SLEEP COUNTRY USA PLUS store, 1170 Biddle Road, Medford Thursday, August 7 through Sunday, August 10th, during the normal business hours
• the Salem Fairgrounds,  Jackman Long Building –  Saturday August 9 (noon to 8 PM) and Sunday August 10 (noon to 8PM). Judging will be Saturday August 16, the weekend before the fair opens.

Entering honey is a good way to educate yourself and the general public about bees. I also encourage you to give back to the general public some of what you know about honey bees by volunteering to assist with the fair bee display. The state Association website orsba.org will be open for volunteer sign up August 1^st.  We need individual names, cell numbers, and addresses for each volunteer so we can send free entry and parking tickets.  I encourage SOBA volunteers (we can use up to 4 volunteers each of the 3 time slots (10-2, 2-6, 6 to close). To sign up go directly to the volunteer sign up form at:

http://orsba.org/htdocs/statefairvolunteer.php

Note: If any volunteer is interested but unable to be at the fair on the club date, please contact Trevor Riches, our OR events Coordinator, directly at osbastatefair@gmail.comso we can help you get your preferred volunteer date and time.

Seaside Conference: The Annual Or beekeepers meeting will be November 6-8 at the Seaside Convention center. In addition to the honey show we will show prize-winning movie “More than Just Honey” at our Thursday night social. The program Friday and Saturday features Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine, Dennis vanEngelsdorp of Maryland and Marla Spivak of Minnesota  plus Willamette Valley beekeepers Judy Scher and Lynn Royce and the students and  bee specialists of OSU and WSU. Mark your calendars now – more information will be posted in August on the orsba.org website.