About

Our Mission

Bee Informed Partnership Inc (BIP) is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that strives to improve honey bee health through data-driven research in collaboration with beekeepers.

Who We Are

The Bee Informed Partnership is a national collaboration of leading research labs and universities in agricultural science to better understand honey bee declines in the United States. Born out of the University of Maryland Bee Lab led by Dennis vanEngelsdorp as former Board President and Karen Rennich as former Executive Director and supported initially by the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, BIP became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2014 to continue working with beekeepers to better understand how we can manage healthier bees.

The key to our success is the true partnership we maintain among a wide range of disciplines including traditional honey bee science, economics, statistics, and medical research. This gives us a unique multidisciplinary perspective on the issues we study. And just as important as the tools are the people. We not only have leading honey bee researchers, but our board represents commercial beekeeping industries and our technical transfer team specialists, lab and IT teams are some of the most experienced in this field.

For a great overview of BIP, listen to one of our Field Specialists, Ben Sallmann, describe our organization in this entertaining podcast.

How We Work

Our highly trained technical transfer specialists provide independent colony health assessments, colony sampling, full pest and pathogen diagnostics, and reporting of assessments. We deliver emergency response kits to operations of any size to assist in investigating reasons for failing colonies. We promote and manage a large, national Sentinel Apiary program where we encourage beekeepers from each state to monitor health metrics and colony weight to add to the national database. We then investigate relationships between forage, nectar flows and diseases. Our nonprofit works directly with industry and researchers to set up, test and analyze field trials of new feed or treatment products. We continue to annually survey beekeepers of all operational sizes for winter, summer and annual losses as well as collect and make available management practices that are associated with increased survivorship. Much of the data from the above initiatives can be found by visiting our Research portal.

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