On May 14th at 7PM, Patrick Jones will present “Pollinator Protection and Mosquito Applications”. Patrick is the Deputy Director of Pesticide Programs in the Structural Pest Control & Pesticides Division within the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. He will talk about different types of mosquito application and protective measures that are in place to protect pollinators from adverse effects from the spray.
Patrick Jones, Deputy Director for Pesticide Programs at the NC Department of Agriculture & Consumer Service, Structural Pest Control and Pesticides Division has worked for the department for over 36 years in various positions including a pesticide inspector, field supervisor and enforcement manager. One of his focus items is the outreach and education efforts to inform growers on the pollinator protection and FieldWatch Programs implemented by NCDA&CS to enhance communication between growers, beekeepers, and applicators. As deputy director, he oversees pesticide registration, field compliance, enforcement and outreach programs focused on ensuring the safe use of pesticides in North Carolina. He has also served as the Region 4 Representative to SFIREG the State-FIFRA Issues Research and Evaluation Group, a network of state officials interested in Federal/State “co-regulation” of pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and served as a member of the Pesticides Operation Management Working Committee under SFIREG. He is currently serving on the AAPCO (Association of American Pest Control Officials) Board of Directors, Chairs the Worker Protection Committee, and Co-Chairs the Pollinator Committee. He has been very active in regional and national training for pesticide inspectors. He also serves on the FieldWatch Board of Directors, representing State Departments of Agriculture. He is a graduate of N.C. State University with a degree in Agronomy.
If you’d like to attend the meeting, send an e-mail to cdonley33 at gmail.com and Carrie will send you the link to the Zoom meeting.
On April 9th at 7PM, Anya McGuirk will present “Monitoring the SAS Hives: Lessons Learned”. SAS is currently monitoring hive weight, internal temperature and humidity, acoustics, and bee activity using computer vision. The goal of the SAS project is to demonstrate SAS analytics and real-time alerts on streaming data—at the edge (at the hive). Anya will share some of their learnings thus far.
Anya McGuirk is a Distinguished Research Statistician in the Internet of Things R&D Division at SAS. She joined SAS and moved to NC in September 2004. Prior to that, Anya was a Full professor at Virginia Tech with a joint appointment in the Departments of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and Statistics. Anya received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in Agricultural Economics and her MSc. from University of Reading (England) where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. Anya was raised on a large farm in Bel Air, Maryland with her 14 siblings. Currently she lives on a small farm in Holy Springs, NC where she gardens and hangs out with her bees and dogs, nerding out on bee data.
If you’d like to attend the meeting, send an e-mail to cdonley33 at gmail.com and Carrie will send you the link. (We’re working on controlling zoombombing-this is a work in progress. We’re all good people and can figure this out. If you’re stuck on the technology, let Carrie or Jessica know, or ask the list serve/google group/gossip email thingy, and we’ll work you through it.-Jessica)
Let me know if you have questions, and I hope you can join the meeting now that it’s on zoom!
Carrie
OCBA monthly meetings will still be happening every 2nd Thursday of the month! We will be meeting by Zoom instead of meeting in person, as a way to continue to learn about bees, and share with each other, while practicing social distancing. It’s also a great way for people to join us who may not normally be able to because they live far away, they can’t get a ride to the meeting, etc. We hope to keep our strong OCBA community active during this time while we’re staying at home.
You may join meetings up to 15 minutes in advance so that you’ll have plenty of time to make sure your connection is working properly. We ask that you mute your microphone especially during the speaker’s presentation in order to avoid unexpected disruptions. We will not have our regular social time at the beginning of the meeting, so our speaker will begin close to 7PM, and we’ll follow that up with the business portion of the meeting including updates on education, outreach, clusters, collaboratives, and the website redesign group. We will be recording meetings so that people can view the meeting at a later time if they can’t attend in person.
We recommend that you download Zoom before the meeting to save you some time. Below is a link to do so.