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General Meeting
March 7 @ 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
We are having a presentation on Queen Rearing by Melanie Kirby.
The bees found Melanie Kirby in the jungles of South America in 1997 and have since taken her around the globe introducing her to the broader fields of agroecology, conscilience research, and whole systems thinking.
After working for 8 years for several commercial beekeeping and queen producing operations, she established Zia Queenbees Farm & Field Institute in 2005 in the the southern Rockies of northern New Mexico- her home state- where she is also a registered tribal member of Tortugas Pueblo. ZQB specializes in regionally-adapted and conscientiously bred bees, applied farm research, pollination services, exquisite hive products, and outreach.
After being in the field for 20 years, Melanie returned to academia to pursue a graduate degree from Washington State University and now works as the Extension Educator at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM where she helped to establish the Land-Grant Ag extension department’s Thunder Bee & Pollinator programs.
Melanie serves on several boards including the NM Beekeepers Association, Western Apicultural Society of North America, American Beekeeping Federation, and Ecdysis. She also serves as a co-cooordinator for the national Managed Pollinator Protection Program working group and is the founder and lead facilitator of the Adaptive Bee Breeders Alliance. She is a writer, artist, National Geographic Explorer and Storytelling Fellow as well as a NM Coalition to Enhance Working Lands Fellow.