Floyd Artisan Trail Tour

The Floyd Artisan Trail Tour is a week-long tour featuring 65 sites across Floyd County with activities at artisan home studios; galleries and shops; wineries; farms and farm markets; and restaurant and lodging sites.

Site activities include the sales and exhibit of fine art, hand-craft and farm products; and demonstrations, classes and talks at sites throughout the county. Some sites will offer discounts to tour visitors with half-price wine tastings, discounts on chocolate, meals and accommodations, or complementary items- portraits, herbal products, pottery. Demonstrations and talks include paper-making, the operations of a sawmill in furniture-making, sculpture carving, weaving and spinning at an alpaca farm, herbal salves, photography, pottery and more.

An Opening Tour Exhibit will be held on Friday, June 10, 5-8pm at Troika Gallery in the Station downtown Floyd. The Exhibit will highlight participating sites and their work.

The staffed exhibit will remain open throughout the tour to provide a central town location for information, brochure and map, and updated schedule.

TOUR MAP

http://floydcountyartisantrail.org/index.php?pr=participantsmap


# 51 Spikenard Farm & Honeybee Sanctuary - We are a non-profit educational & research organization committed towards saving the honeybee—located on a beautiful hill in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Tour info: Open All Tour Days. Sat & Sun 1pm talk on Colony Collapse Syndrome. Visit the bees daily in good weather.

The Drones

... After looking into the life expression of the queen bee and the worker bees, let us complete the picture by observing the drones.

These plump, amiable, gentle males are physically the largest and heaviest of the three kinds of bees in the hive. They have much larger feelers and much larger eyes than the workers; you can even hold them in your hand and they won't sting you since they have no 'weapon' at all! Their very distinguished important role within the hive seems to be limited to mating with the queen. And not all of them; only a few will perform that task. They are almost the opposite of worker bees: they don't work at all, they can't even feed themselves; the workers feed them. To an observer they play a very passive role among all the 'busy bees' until the 'right' sunny day. Then they fly up about 500-600 feet into the air, hovering in mysterious locations that attract drones from a radius as wide as eight to ten miles. The young queen fly up to these 'meadows in the sky', up and beyond the cloud of drones, followed by the lightest and strogest of them. Up to a dozen can mate with the queen - and die. The queen returns to the hive with enough semen to normally last her a lifetime, four to five years....

From Towards Saving the Honeybee by Gunther Hauk
http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Saving-Honeybee-Gunther-Hauk/