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,…
Author: Karen Rennich
I am the Executive Director of the Bee Informed Partnership and the Project Manager of the UMD Honey Bee Research Lab. I am fortunate to work closely with all members of our team and other organizations throughout the U.S. and I get to tackle everything from data analysis to field work and all jobs in between to keep our goals in sight and moving toward our milestones. I have a B.S. in ocean engineering from Purdue University and an M.S. in ocean engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. I designed and worked on large, underwater Navy sensor systems when I was employed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for 14 years. I have been a beekeeper for 12 years and manage 10 colonies at home. Seeing the Bee Informed Partnership evolve from paper to reality is exciting and inspiring.
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…
The BIP Box: February
It is February 18th as we write this with most of our BIP commercial operations in almonds. The weather has been perfect for sampling and as far as we know, none of our teams have been stuck in the mud. They’ve been extremely busy going through colonies in CA, TX and FL. The Maryland Lab is working on overdrive to process thousands of samples, turning them around in time to be able to make near real time management changes. January averages for varroa were at 0.70 mites/100 bees from all the teams and are holding at 0.51 mites/100 bees thus far in February. Those bees…
The BIP Box: January
Welcome The BIP Box! Our newest feature also being presented on Project Apis m. 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. Please join us here each month to learn what we are seeing. January found us meeting with our tech teams and holding our first BIP stakeholder meetings at both national conferences. Thank you to all that attended and participated! We are concerned about high mite loads in some areas as well as accompanying high losses with associated risks of not…
Joe Traynor’s Post-Pollination Letter
To many beekeepers who keep a few colonies in their backyard or even for some who have 50 or 100 colonies, moving bees to pollination is not something they would ever consider. Just like reading the Travel section in the paper or travelogues by seasoned globetrotters, arm chair beekeepers can read what happened in almonds this year. Joe Traynor, owner of Scientific Ag. Co. (a pollination service and consulting company) was kind enough to allow us to blog his latest post-pollination letter here (click on link below). The newsletter is like reading a letter from a family member with some back-fence news included. It is…
Regional Reports – Hot off the Press!
The regional management reports from the 2012-2013 Winter Loss and Management surveys are posted here: https://beeinformed.org/results-categories/regional-results/ Click on the map in your area of interest and you will be taken to all significant results for that region in pdf format. Because we are only posting those results that showed significant differences, report content may vary from region to region. Please feel free to explore all regions and see the differences! We are excited about some of the results and the Bee Informed Partnership hopes this fosters discussion among beekeepers and bee clubs and powers hypothesis driven research among scientists. There are two states that earned their…