How about a few reports from EAS?

[Andrew Dewey]

From any of you lucky enough to be in Boone this week!

[Bsupplier]

Classes are great!
Campus on the side of a mountain. Be prepared to hike.

[NewbeeNnc]

Got ran out of the vendor area this morning. 5 minutes too early. I didn't take it as bad as some others. Was kind of rude.

[cdanderson]

This was my first EAS meeting. A good time but I would have liked to see a little more variety in the classes for those of us who were only there for a few days.. and the walk from the parking area was a killer !

[Ski]

My first EAS meeting as well but I did attend the full week. The walk from the parking lot to the Student union building was a challenge but I was getting in shape by the end of the week. They started a shuttle by mid week but I stuck to walking. Once you got to the Student Union building you could pretty much stay there if you wanted. It is a large building with large quantity of seating, rest rooms, small restaurant, vendors, registration desk that was maned with helpful folks just about all the time. I did not get a meal ticket but did eat at the cafeteria a couple of days and the food was very good, also ate at restaurants which were a short walk to down town.
The vendors started noontime on Tuesday or Wednesday I forget but they held everyone out until they were set up.
The short course was good being a 4th year beekeeper I went back and forth between the two levels but there was still a lot of good information.
The conference was great with most of the presenters keeping things at a level we could understand with not too many complicated charts and graphs. Saw the movie "Vanishing Of The bees" with David Mendes and Dave Hackenburg. Both guys were at the conference.
The latest research on Nosema and pesticides, studies on feral bees, a great dissecting class, the bee rodeo was fun (we took first place in the hive carry). I have attended a few of the North Carolina State beekeeping meetings and found the same thing to be true at this conference you cannot get to all of the talks and workshops, with 4 going on at one time some repeated some not.
Next years EAS will be in Rhode Island.
Overall I had a great time met some interesting people learned a lot and had FUN!

[NewbeeNnc]

Heard some complaints from On-campus (workers) non-beekeeper folks that the people at the conference were rude, unhappy, full of complaints. Unfortunatly these people will come away thinking all bee keepers are this way. Got this from 3 different unrelated ASU employees. I will say I heard some attendees talking about how rude EAS folks were and how hard they were to deal with.

Did anyone else expereince this or am I living in a vaccum?

[Ski]

rude, unhappy, full of complaints

WOW that is sad to hear, we (EAS) were guests on the campus and any complaints should have been taken to the EAS folks, they were not hard to find.
I did not hear any comments that but the workers / students that I encountered were helpful and I was glad they were there to help or point us in the right direction.

IF you get between 500 and 600 people from all over the east coast and then some there are bound to be come complainers in there somewhere.

IF IF you wanted to complain:
The walk was long from the parking lot to the Student Union building down hill up hill steps downhill steps uphill and then you walk back.( in hardship cases there was parking at the parking deck behind the Student Union building)

Some folks did not get parking passes and they were strict about parking.

IF you were picking up items from vendors the road got blocked by construction and I heard they still would not let you down the road to pick stuff up.

If you stayed in the college dorms I heard they were like college dorms lol.

We got rain one afternoon.
........................................

I had a great time!!!