Attendees: Nathan, Kristina, Gail, David, Bryan, Lynn, Camy

  • Board nominations
    • Bryan would like to step down as mentorship chair and would like to be vice president, interested in leading more education in the apiary
    • Nathan nominated David Hughes for mentorship chair
    • Starting a journeyman class will encourage people to serve on the board to get points toward their journeyman certification
    • We really need an outreach person
  • Membership – do some outreach to old members in January, interested to know why you have stopped coming and is there something that is missing
  • Apiary update
    • We received a donation of 12 hives, goal is to get them to the apiary by March
    • Currently getting rid of all the piles of blackberries and putting weed mat over it.
    • Plan to grow a type of mushroom that bees really like
    • Goal of the apiary is not to make honey, it’s to make bees!!
      • Most of it will be working hives that we can split and sell bees to members; a few in the front that will be for educational purposes, demonstrating multiple types of hives
      • Jordan is interested in giving queen rearing classes
    • Nathan, Bryan, and Jordan have met – have a working document on what we think we need out there and roles and responsibilities
      • Nathan will get it up and running
      • Jordan will take care of all the hives
      • Bryan will do 1:1 or teaching with specific hives
    • Eventually teach a class to the kids at the Freedom Farm
  • Education
    • Journeyman class
      • Paul and Jeff will teach one, probably at Swantown, not sure when yet
      • WSBA program is not very user-friendly – we could administer their program and fill in all the blanks
      • Need to look up what they are charging now to set the fee for the class
    • Club wants to set the schedule for classes at the beginning of the year so people can plan.
  • Technology
    • Getting a lifetime license for our membership system
      • We pay $300 per year to get some features, we have only scratched the surface of functionality available
      • Possible to log in with Google, possible to tie together with old login if already have one
      • Only log in right now to sign up for a class or renew your membership; eventually will need to be a member to buy club bees
      • $1,500 lifetime license, can get on sale for $1,200. Includes support.
      • Board votes YES to a lifetime license.
    • Website outage a couple weeks ago
      • Currently we pay $15 per month for website hosting, plus a $200 charge once a year for the secure certificate
      • Nathan has a hosting server for the Inn and neighborhood, etc. He is proposing taking over the hosting, which would remove the secure certificate fee. Would charge the club $200 a year. Uses a pretty generic wordpress back end.
      • Board votes YES to move the website to the new server.
    • Club has an instagram page – needs more people posting
    • Nathan set us up with a new square account to accept payment, David will look into getting a Venmo account
    • Idea to publish a calendar of events on the website
  • Review of grant progress – Received $22.5K, split quarterly
    • Folks at Inspire Olympia have been noticing our posts to FB – keep it up!
    • Nathan met with science teacher at OSD – this year will focus on trying to get into the elementary levels – would fulfill a big requirement of the grant
    • Raising the profile of the club in a good way – Nathan did a talk at Panorama City, Rotary Club, article in Thurston Talk
  • Getting speakers for upcoming meetings
    • David met with an Entomologist in Seattle who may be interested in giving a presentation
    • Reach out to Jordan to do another queen rearing talk – maybe drum up interest in a class at the farm and people who want to buy queens
  • Library
    • Lynn would like to get a better bookcase for the library 
    • Idea: to get the books out there more, wonder if the Olympia Library would house our OBA collection and manage it all for us, they don’t have the sorts of books we have, wouldn’t be able to limit it to just members
    • Miss when Lynn would bring books to the meeting and promote them – wouldn’t be able to do that if the books were at the library
    • Give out the bee journals at the classes
  • Next time at the Fair (lessons learned)
    • Do the honey tasting inside the booth so that people come in
    • Maybe have a new jar of each tasting honey each day
    • People wanted to buy the honey they were tasting and we didn’t have any
    • Needed more honey ready to sell as well (sold out)
    • Remaining clothing at the bee booth – raffle the rest off