 Okay, so, I've been teaching something formally in a classroom since I was 18 years old, and I do have an education minor. I used to substitute teach, but I also knew when I was looking at this last grant cycle. I knew that there were plenty of people who wanted to know more about different topics within beekeeping that I didn't know, but there's a lot of people locally who do know those special topics, and so since I'm a good administrator, I thought, you know, I can help these people and turn them into partners of mine, and so that's what I did. I looked at all the gaps that our current bee clubs and beekeeping classes have, and turned all of that into learning circles. So again, I had three farmer partners in the Iowa Farmers Union who has a booth out here, and I'm sure you've worked with the Farmers Union, so they were my fiscal, oh, they still are my fiscal agent. We still have a few more months to go on the grant, so the things that you see in this presentation are very, very applicable to other producer groups. So I'll go back to the club meetings. I have been running a beekeeping club since 2011, and I've taught beekeeping classes since 2013, so the club almost always meets in person, and I will give everyone a survey in January. We'll just sit around and we'll talk about what do we want to learn this year as a group, and there's just a lot of things we can never, ever get to for topics, because usually we meet after work on a weekday, and it's going to get dark, or if it's summer, you'll see the picture here. We're meeting at a club member's house, so everyone has to be okay with the parking and all the people at their house opening up bees, and all the neighbors have to know, like, hey, we're going to be having a bee club meeting. So we're also limited by person who can come and present. There's just a very, very mixed skill level of attendees, and you never know what the weather is going to be like either. And then on the flip side, like, right now is when we start to have beekeeping classes, and it's in a classroom. We can't be outside working bees right now, so we're really limited in what we can actually talk about, and to get everything addressed, you know, just is not feasible to talk about every single thing. We also have Facebook groups, but I think everyone knows Facebook groups have a lot of limits. It is nice to discuss things in between meetings with the Facebook group. It's a lot more manageable than running an email list, and only about half the people in the group are beekeepers, because we just open it up to everyone. So here's an example of why I thought learning circles would be good. One question that we get a lot would be, can you tell me about queen rearing with local genetics? And so we're all sitting in a circle. There's like eight of us, and sure, a lot of us know this, but it's something that you have to learn hands on. You can't just explain it, and then you know all about it. There are national options to take short courses, but, you know, it takes a lot of arranging to go to one of those classes. It's usually not so much about the tuition, but just the logistics, the housing, finding whoever's going to take care of the stuff that you're leaving behind to go there. There's just nothing in Iowa to, so, the other example is, this is a real life example. This is a picture where someone's wanting to know if we can help them get the bees out of this chimney. So I can't even tell where the chimney is. If this is the chimney, how far off the ground this is, is this person's house, is this somebody else's house, is the ground level, like, is this building under demo, like, what's the story? Like, there's just, there's no way. So there's just no way to address all the topics that people are asking for appropriately, either at a club meeting or in a Facebook group. So I knew that other people did learning circles, so I thought we should try to do that. So again, I already knew that there were topics that people wanted, and so I narrowed down and selected topics based on what people had demanded or requested, I guess not demanded. If I knew that there was someone locally as a subject matter expert who could teach in person, hands-on, we were going to go ahead and meet online for some of those quicker topics that were just more specialized, and if it was a topic that was pretty weather-dependent or seasonally-dependent, like queen rearing or doing a split, we would do those in person, and this is how I came up with these topics here. So again, I tried to do something online every month, and then, again, seasonally do these other topics where I knew I could have someone present in person. I'm guessing your group has similar topics. I do want to say I did pay my talent. It's just something that we had to work out. I did charge people $20 as a deposit to save their spot because I could not afford to have anyone flake out on me. Once they came and attended, they would get their $20 back. It was not refundable. And I had, so in-person topics were $20, and I had capacity to have up to 20 people, and each time I think I had only two people not show. So pretty good rate. Again, if I'm going to have someone put in a lot of resources because they're live bees, and they had to do a lot of work to get those bees ready to have people come over, I couldn't have them. They need to be compensated for their loss. So again, I could not have people flaking out. So here's some examples. I'm going to give two examples of the online learning circles we did. Everyone always asks about queen bees. I don't know what it would be for you if it's labeling or whatever. But we had the state apiarist come and talk. He has seen way more queens than any regular beekeeper would ever see. Even if you are a commercial beekeeper, you only know your operation. You don't know what Joe down the street is doing or Sally down the road is doing. So he definitely came and added a lot to the meeting. He's very willing to share and very eager. Audiences are very eager to listen to him. This is Wayne. This is an idea that I had. I watched a presentation from Iowa Learning Farms. They did a tractor ride. And it was recorded. And then the farmer was narrating it as it was playing. So that's what we did here. Because, again, this is early April when you have a dead-out, March or April. And I remember this one in particular, because the Iowa women were playing. It was very important that Wayne be done recording so he could get back home to watch the game in time. So we got together. And again, we were presenting all of our online learning circles at night, because most of our beekeepers work. They do it on the side. And we can't do a beekeeping inspection during the nighttime. So we had a prerecorded video, Wayne narrated it live. So we didn't have to worry about weather, worry about sunlight, or anything like that. And we got really good comments back from it. So I just wanted to say the second comment here. I just wish I had had this experience when I first started beekeeping. So, again, I think it's something that you're never gonna know everything there is to know. We did online learning circles. This is wet grafting. So wet grafting is a way to raise queens. This is the one I was saying that there's no in-state class. This was very resource-intensive. So Tyler was the instructor. She's on the left there. Jamie had driven, I think, two hours to come and take this class. Again, I asked them for only $20, but they did have to bring their own headlamp, their own magnifier. We supplied them with grafting tools. They had two different ones to choose from. Tyler, I don't know if you can see them, they're hovering over the board on the table. So Tyler had to time her production so that everybody got one frame of larva at just the right age for them to work on. So it took a lot of resources for her. We had a big show and tell to show all the different kinds of hive tools and grafting tools. We gave them two options. There's actually probably six different options if you wanted to go shopping for one, and you could try one, hold it, see what it was like, and then something, again, you can't really get this unless you're in person. Tyler gave a demonstration manipulating the hive boxes around and then someone came up to make sure she understood it and copied her. And everybody had that opportunity if you wanted to repeat it just to make sure you got it. So here is some of the feedback and then I wanted to look at the second one here where the participants that I tried once at grafting but I failed because I didn't manipulate the hive appropriately. So this class was great and I'm so excited to go home and give it a proper go. Another thing that I just picked up on from listening to people is cutouts. So cutouts are where you have bees who have moved into a structure and they need to be physically cut out in order to remove them. So again, another really, really resource intensive kind of job. This was a barn abandoned, was not being used. It was in Knoxville, the presenter lived in Ames, but again, because he and I were working together on some other things, I can say that there's a lot more demand for people to remove bees than there are beekeepers who know how to do it. So the property owner had to be okay with us coming and hanging out and having lunch with them and do you have electricity? Do you have water? Where can people park? Are you okay with this? It took a good part of the day. And just like the wet grafting workshop, Ben and I hauled in way more equipment just to show everyone these are all the options. These are all the tools you need to have in your toolkit, whether you need them all or not, you don't know until you get to the site and you can survey it just to show everyone this is a real snapshot of all the things that this kind of work entails. So people got to take things home, just like the grafting people got to take home, grafting tools, they got to take home, you know, all the little supplies, these people also got to take home some things as well. And again, I couldn't have lunch order for people if they were gonna flake on me so they had to give me, you know, a $20 deposit. Lots of really good feedback on that. So here is kind of the lay of the land, the audiences, a lot of beginners came to the narrowed video inspections and I do wanna give a little plug, I think after this talk, but down the hallway to the right kit from the Iowa Center for Ag Law and Taxation is gonna give a talk about business transitions. I know there was one about insurance earlier. That is a very, it applies to many, many audiences and that was, I think the highest number of registrations we'd seen. Like I said before, all the in-person learning circles ran at capacity. I think they didn't show up as much for the online because, A, they forgot because they just don't have as much as stake, they didn't give us that $20. They didn't have to take time off and they were kind of counting on recordings to be there afterwards. So I think this was pretty interesting. People drove quite a ways for the right topic. I had an April learning circle in Ames. The June learning circle was in North Des Moines. July was in Knoxville. So this is where everybody drove from. And then when we look at success, we definitely had some repeat participants. And like I said, we always had two people who did not show up even though they gave us their $20. The other thing that I'm really interested to look at is how well did the partners experience pan out? So we had to reschedule our November online learning circle. We're doing that in February. And we've already got people signed up for it. I did get this little feedback here from one of the partners, even though I haven't asked them, he went ahead and he sent me this message here. So it's definitely been something that the partners, they've maybe always wanted to give a presentation. They just weren't sure quite how to get there. And so again, that's where I think my talent is more in producing events and making things happen. I have a pretty wide network and I've been doing this for a long time. So again, that's why I think this was a really good grant for me as a partnership grant. I don't know if there's a limit on the number of partners you can have, but you can ask Krista, she's here, and she would answer that. I will ask the partners later how to do that. If you were gonna do this, I would say this, picture here with the QR codes, I think that's a really big piece of the success I had. So I'd show up at an online, or I'm sorry, I'd show up in person and I'd have a welcome table there. They didn't have to sign up because I already knew who they were. There's only 20 people, but they could come get a drink and then while they were talking and socializing, which they said was one of the best benefits of getting together in person was talking with each other. They also had this little announcement thing where they could scan a QR code because we're out in the middle of the field, right? We're not in a nice room like this. So the next couple online and in-person learning circles were listed on here and they could sign up right then and there out in the field with that QR code so I could get people right away. I did certainly send email to everybody just in case. We had certain things developing that the rest of the wider beekeeping world would not need to know. I kind of wanted to give it a little bit of exclusivity. We also created a private Facebook group because some things you just don't understand unless you're there so you can only talk with each other. Your mileage may vary if you do that or as tended to not have that much traffic like we thought but we didn't know, right? Nobody knew that. If you do this, I would say, especially if you're out in the middle of nowhere, find someone else who can go run to the gas station, get a bag of ice or bottles of water, don't do that yourself. That was, I think, kind of a harder thing to do because then there's no point in person there for that instructor if they need something. I think that it was pretty successful. There's no harm in doing something different. I will say this is kind of like we were talking about the state group or the larger regional groups aren't doing this even though I think it's perfectly natural that they would but they don't. Social media is something that really helped and you can see here the social media, it's all kind of the same color scheme, same fonts. If you can make sure you are putting this out where all those lone rangers are. Everybody loves YouTube and Facebook and if you can be there too and they'll see that, they'll sign up. They would never join whatever club but they would certainly sign up to learn more. That's who I sat with at lunch. He would never join but he would come to hear. So if you have questions you can get a hold of me here. Again, this was my partnership grant. Krista is just down the hallway giving a whole talk about that. But if you have questions about applying for a grant or how to do a learning circle, that's my info. I can give you my card if you want. But yeah, that's it. Yes, I did everything through PayPal. So PayPal can take credit cards or I think there's only one person who wanted to give me a check. No, there are two people who wanted to give me a check and that's fine. So it wasn't too much of a... Nope, and they had a survey after two. So after the end, and you can do that on Zoom, you can give everybody a survey before they leave. That just happens automatically. If you can give people a paper survey, well, before they leave the site, they almost always filled it out and gave it back to me. I also did a model release so that I could use or the Farmer's Union or Sarah could use their image. The next one we're doing is storytelling so it's gonna include their voice, any video. So make sure they sign that release instead of a check mark. We did have a couple people come with their kids because their kids were the ones interested in the topic more than they were. So I had to have the parent sign for the kid and print the kid's name, which you could probably experience that too. Let's see, what can I think of? I don't know, we have a... Oh, I guess I could say I do have a learning circle in the works for this next year. And instead of a $20 deposit, people are gonna pay, I think $125 for queen rearing and they're all on board with it. I think part of it is because they're in town. Again, it's not really the tuition that keeps people from going to Minnesota or going to Montana or Florida. I think it's all the arrangements for what they're leaving behind to go. So I think having it be local is really what makes it doable for them. I don't think it's the money as much. And then I also have to talk to my partner like, hey, Tyler, can we do this for 2024? And I can only pay you a third of what I paid you this last time, because we didn't know if there was gonna be demand for it. And then, like Ben, doing the cutouts, we never know, we kind of, we get a lot of swarm calls and cutout calls, but you kind of have to track the progress like six months beforehand before you can actually say, hey, this is the time and day that we're gonna do this event. It takes a lot of negotiating with the property owner and are the bees still alive? And so if you're gonna do a site visit somewhere, yeah, it's just a lot of negotiating. And I think because it's normally something, Ben would charge a fee for like, hey, I'll take bees out of your barn for $300 or whatever. We just said, hey, you can get it for free. We'll give you lunch. Whatever honey we find, you can keep that honey. We're gonna camp out at your place for like five hours. And, you know, they were fine. I mean, they were interested. So again, you gotta have that right host. So yeah, it took a while to get it all arranged, but it worked out. I mean, I think if it's easy, that's a good sign.