Easton Band Offstage | Easton Municipal Band

The Band Offstage

We keep busy when we're not rehearsing or performing! We hope you enjoy this section of our website where we share pictures and sometimes stories about ourselves when we're offstage.

Profile - Bob Oddo, Beekeeper

Bob Oddo (Saxophone), has been a proud member of the Easton Municipal Band for 40 years (1985)! His hobby is Beekeeping. He started Beekeeping in 1970 with his Grandfather, Stewart Fretz , who had about 20 hives (easy to manage then). The beekeeping industry has taken on a major change with many challenges from environmental chemicals, bee mites, viruses and hive beetles and many more. Now, Bob has 6 bee hives on his property that produced 285 pounds of honey last year! It’s a gratifying, but time consuming hobby!

Honey bees and wild bees are needed to pollinate our gardens and orchards. The bee life cycle is: the queen bee can live about 2-5 years. She lays all the eggs and regulates the hive via her pheromones for the worker bees that are also females. These female worker bees live 6 weeks to 6 months except in the summer months when they are bringing in honey and pollen. They work themselves to death in about 6 weeks! The winter worker bees (diutinus bees)) live 4- 6 months. They are born in late autumn. Since there is no work to do after it gets too cold for them to leave the hive, they stay inside and huddle for warmth and live until spring time. I put candy boards made out of sugar on each hive consisting of 16 lbs of sugar. This helps to feed them if they run out of the honey. The only male bee is called a drone. They live 4-8 weeks and their job is to mate with a queen ,then they die immediately. Once this occurs, the worker bees kick most of the drones out of the hive in autumn to conserve food of the hive.

Today’s Honey Bees now need the beekeeper’s attention (similar to a human doctor) every week or so to implement strategies to help them survive. The Honey bee is so smart, but still needs human intervention!

I’m a member of the Lehigh Valley Beekeepers, and the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers organizations. If any organization or Fair would be interested in having the Pennsylvania Honey Queen attend their events to promote and explain beekeeping to the public, reach out through the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association website to schedule your events. The attached picture (myself and wife Ellen and Honey Queen) is 3 years ago from the PA Bee Conference at Penn State. As consumers, let’s help out by planting wildflower gardens, and please stop spraying your lawns- they are beautiful the way God intended them to look like. Honey bees love dandelion and clover. I seed white clover every year in our lawn.