The June meeting was the second at the Bulimba Community Centre. The venue is working well for us and may become our permanent space.
We made an effort to boost attendance at this event as we recognized the speaker and topic would have broad appeal. With the help of ABC Radio Brisbane and a promise of live bee exhibits we succeeded to pulling about 45 attendees in person and an-other 16 online.
The Chair Dean Haley opened the meeting and welcomed attendees. We launched straight into our main business, the guest speaker. We were honoured to host Greg Coonan who shared his journey from retiring from his day job, to growing a stingless bee hobby, and finally finding he was not so retired after all. Greg is a good soul, who shared insights and tips into management of stingless bees. Much of this insight can also be found in Greg’s re-cently published book on the subject. This book is nicely written in simple English and easy to understand, a great resource for beginners. One for the reading list.
General business: Dean conveyed some of the items dis-cussed at ANBA Management Committee, including the recent participation at Northey St Markets for World Bee Day. The day was a great success with lots of interest and engagement. Thanks to those volunteers who manned the ANBA booth.
Upcoming Events. There are several upcoming events that ANBA could be involved in with a stall. We would love some volunteers to help with these events, which could be done on a roster approach. If you want to volunteer, please contact Dean Haley or Ian Driver.
Mentoring. We have tried mentoring in the past with some success. We would like to keep this going, perhaps by implementing something a bit more formal, or just by hitching up mentors and mentees at our meetings.
Next Meeting: 1pm, Sunday 4 July 2021, Bulimba Community Centre.
“Our Commercialisation Journey”,
by Francois and Mariki Visser
Mariki & Francois started their Australian Na-tive Bee journey in 2016 when learning about the use of native bee propolis for making the mouthpiece of a digeridoo. They immediately were intrigued by the dark brown propolis and their journey of discovering more about the native bee propolis industry started. Today they have 600 hives and are exporting their propolis products to sev-eral countries.
Read more and get the details to attend either in person or by Zoom, on page 10 of this issue.
We will deal with branch business following the talk
For more info on branch activities, visit our Facebook page Brisbane Branch, Australian Native Bee Association, https://www.facebook.com/bnbeec