Recommended agenda for presentation

[mtbe]

I am a new beekeeper and would like to give a presentation about bees to my garden club.  I'm having difficulties coming up with 3-4 key points to keep it at about 30-45 minutes.

I'm sure they know how helpful bees are.  But I thought the following:

- Pollination: Even though they know about pollination, give them an idea of the crops and amount of produce bees help along with pollination.
- Diseases/CCD: Everytime I tell someone I'm beekeeping, they note they don't see bees anymore.
- Chemicals: many insecticides used will also kill bees.
- Bee Products, besides honey and wax: not everyone knows that pollen and propilis are collected

Any other key topics or assistance out there?  Are there better topics to discuss with a garden club?

[tshnc01]

Looks like a good list to me.  Maybe also a slide that talks about bees from the point of view of a single  bee colony:
   - 1 queen, a few males and many thousands of worker females
   - How far bees range away from their hive
   - How much honey one hive typically produces
   - How much effort bees expend to produce a pound of honey (Fly 55,000 miles and visit 2 million flowers)
   - A single bee will produce about 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime...

Just a few quick thoughts.

...Tim

[Natalie]

People are interested in bee facts, like how many bees it takes to produce a teaspoon of honey and how far the average bee flies in her lifetime.
Every presentation I have been to people always like the story of how the drones all get kicked out of the hive come fall, sometimes the presenter gets real funny about it and gets alot of laughs.
How many eggs a queen can lay per day, how far they generally fly from the hive to forage etc.