Hi! I’m a new member of the Midwest Tech Team, and am looking forward to meeting many of you in the future. Here is a little bit about my honey bee background and my motivation for getting involved in the Bee Informed Partnership: I first became interested in honey bees when I was taking an animal behavior class as a college undergraduate. It fascinated me that so many individuals help the queen reproduce, sacrificing their own reproduction. I wanted to learn the theories underlying this phenomenon, and found that the more I learned, the more my interest in bees was cultivated. I wanted to learn…
Year: 2016
New Web-based Tool for Fast Identification of Bee Mites
Parasitic mites are known to be a factor in recent declines in bee pollinator populations. In particular, Varroa destructor, an introduced parasite and disease vector, has decimated colonies of the western honey bee, one of the most important agricultural pollinators in the world. Further, global trade in alternative pollinators increases the likelihood of moving mites, so there is a potential for more Varroa-style invasions. USDA’s Identification Technology Program (ITP) has released Bee Mite ID: Bee-associated Mite Genera of the World, its latest identification tool, to help biosecurity specialists and beekeepers identify the mites of greatest concern, which could help prevent such invasions. Bee Mite ID…
Want to Help Bees? – BIP Tech Team Fundraiser
Want to Help Honey Bees? DONATE! Help us expand the Bee Tech Team program to improve honey bee health and safeguard the food supply. WE NEED YOUR HELP. The success of the Bee Tech Team program has created demands beyond the scope of our existing funds. To scale our impact, we’re launching a campaign to raise 50K, a small portion of those funds. Help our campaign by donating funds and sharing our ask with others. ENGAGE. Help us spread the word by agreeing to share our campaign with your network. AMPLIFY. Provide a grant and/or matching funds to ensure the campaign’s success. HOW DO BEE TECH…
Technical Transfer Team Job Posting – We are growing!
The Bee Informed Partnership (www.beeinformed.org) is seeking additional Technical Transfer Team members to work with commercial beekeepers in the following states: Minnesota (serving beekeepers in MN and ND), Florida (serving beekeepers in FL and GA), Texas (serving beekeepers in TX and ND), and possibly two new teams in the northern Midwest and Northeast. Teams will serve beekeepers in the home states as well as when they move their colonies into almonds in California. The salary range is $40,000-42,000 (based on experience) per year and will include full medical and retirement benefits. For Minnesota, the team will be based out of the University of Minnesota. For Florida,…
Explore the BIP Database
There is a new link on our homepage titled "Explore!". Click here to explore the ever growing Bee Informed Partnership Database. Here we have new, interactive pages that allow you to view detailed honey bee health data from survey and sample efforts. You can view yearly, state loss data for the annual loss survey in an interactive map. Then, you can look at differences in loss levels based on management practices, filtering to any year or state of interest. Interested in pest levels found in your state? On our 'State Reports' page you can explore USDA APHIS honey bee survey data to find out varroa…
MOMs and BIP in one location – please stop by!
For our local supporters, MOMs Organic Market in DC is donating 5% of their proceeds this Wednesday, June 22nd, to the Bee Informed Partnership. Please shop from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Ivy City location, come and meet part of our lab team at the store, get some great food for the week and help support our work. The core mission of our nonprofit is to provide the resources needed to reduce honey bee colony loss by providing relevant, timely colony data for beekeepers to make informed management decisions. We provide educational resources and information on the importance of honey bees for our…
The BIP Box: June
Welcome to The BIP Box! The BIP Box is a new feature in partnership with PAm. Here we will give you short updates on our BIP Tech Teams and BIP projects. We look forward to partnering with PAm to help get the word out on BIP activities through their newsletter. Please join us here each month to learn what we are seeing. Honey flows start, supers are going on and that means a bounty of samples The summer field season is hard upon us and all of our tech teams are sampling their beekeepers to complete health assessments before honey supers go on. This means that our…
The BIP Box: May
May showers bring June flowers…and the BIP National Loss Survey results The month of May always heralds the release of preliminary results from our BIP National Loss survey. But before we get into the results and what those mean, May Tech Team sampling resulted in averages of Nosema and Varroa loads across all tech teams at 0.75 million spores/bee and 0.55 mites/100 bees respectively. Our preliminary loss report was posted on May 10th with more than 5,700 beekeepers responding. Colony losses in 2015-2016 inched up to an annual total loss of 44.1% with increases in both summer (28.1%) and winter (28.1%) total losses. You can…
The BIP Box: April
A busy April…and, as always, a challenging month for weather As we wait for the results from the almond bee bread samples taken in February and March, our teams are gearing up for a very busy season. It is always fascinating to follow crop pollination events, find out who is making splits, how queen production is faring and what weather patterns are either cooperating or wreaking havoc. So far in April, both nosema and Varroa loads have remained low, averaging across all tech teams at 0.73 million spores/bee and 0.31 mites/100 bees respectively. Here is the news from our tech teams across the country. Texas:…
The BIP Box: March Madness
Splitting colonies coming out of almonds this year has been difficult for some of our beekeepers affected by the sudden loss of much of the brood raised near the end of almond pollination. The jury is still out, but symptoms look very similar to the bee kill that occurred in 2014 and may be due to fungicides or IGRs (or combination of both). Some of our tech teams have spent the last 2 weeks making the rounds to beekeepers, taking samples from bee bread, pupae, and eclosed bees that just can’t make it out of the cells. We are working closely with the California Department…