Tri County Beekeepers Association

Tri County Beekeepers Association covers real ground: the club serves beekeepers across Freestone, Limestone, and Leon Counties, with Fairfield, Texas as home base on the I-45 corridor midway between Dallas and Houston. The meeting format is as unfussy as the country it serves — members gather at Sam’s Restaurant in Fairfield on the 4th Tuesday of the month from January through October (shifting to the 2nd Tuesday in December), showing up around 5:30pm to order barbecue before the meeting proper starts at 6:00pm.

Over dinner, members trade hands-on know-how: hive inspections, pest and disease control, requeening, and timing the honey pull around local wildflower flows. The club also works its public-outreach side, partnering with the local Chambers of Commerce in Freestone, Leon, and Limestone counties to put beekeeping information in front of the wider community.

For residents rather than beekeepers, the association is most useful when bees show up where they aren’t wanted. The club’s website maintains a removals resource pointing people toward beekeepers who handle swarm and colony removal in the tri-county area — worth bookmarking before swarm season, which typically sweeps through this stretch of Texas from March into June. Cost and terms for any removal are set by the individual beekeeper who takes the call.

New keepers get mentors who understand local forage and weather; old hands get company and group buying power. To learn more, get meeting details, or join, visit the club’s page or email donaltland@embarqmail.com.