From Phil Craft to beekeepers

I have a long history of communicating with beekeepers. For many years I have been invited to speak at beekeepers’ meetings from my local Bluegrass Beekeepers Association meetings (in Lexington), throughout Kentucky, and nationally. While serving Kentucky’s beekeepers as the State Apiarist (1999 through 2011) I spent a lot of time on the telephone and in emails answering questions & providing information to beekeepers, in addition to helping in-person while attending the many beekeeping meetings. For many years I wrote a monthly beekeeping newsletter titled ‘The Buzz’ that was produced and distributed by the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. After retiring from the KDA, I created (with a lot of help from my friend Barry Richards) a personal beekeeping webpage, PhilCraftHiveCraft.com. In addition to the evolving educational content on that webpage, I invited email questions & offered public and private responses to them. From 2013 through the spring of 2018, I penned a Question-and-Answer column in Bee Culture magazine, “Ask Phil”. Many of the columns are still available out in hyperspace. If you use a search engine like Google you can find them; just search ‘Ask Phil, Bee Culture magazine’, and you can even add a specific beekeeping subject in your search.

In more recent years I have served as a consultant for Veto-pharma, a French beekeeping pharmacological company best known for Apivar, serving as their North America technical adviser. This position extended my travels throughout North America and into Europe, where I visited beekeepers and attended and spoke at state and national meetings, and answered  international questions from beekeepers.

In early 2022, while continuing to work for Veto-pharma mostly from home, I made the decision to pretty much stop traveling for work, and work more at being retired - but not completely, I still work from home a few hours a week for Veto-pharma. I wanted to stay home, and not travel, where I could spend more time with my bees and my family. Being at home with more leisure time allowed me to become more involved with my local beekeeping group, as well as the Kentucky State Beekeepers Association, where I took on the role of KSBA Education Coordinator. This position allows me to provide educational opportunities for Kentucky beekeepers, including recruiting speakers for state meetings and conducting online beekeeping classes, which have been recorded and can be found on the KSBA website.

This history leads us to this online KSBA webpage forum. Here I will continue this communication with beekeepers, discussing beekeeping and honeybee topics as well as answering questions via email. I may even wander away from honeybees from time to time. Many beekeepers are also interested in other insects - “bugs” - as am I. I have also collected a large number of interesting photographs throughout my travels that I would be happy to share with you as well.

If you have a beekeeping question feel free to email me and I will email you back an answer.

So come back. In the next post I will talk about honey bees & beekeeping.

Phil Craft