Thank you to the 2,500+ beekeepers who already took the survey! As of this morning (4/6/2016), over 2,500 of you already submitted your answers to the Colony Loss Survey and over 1,500 of you continued to the Management Survey. Thank you for your time and continued support! This current rate of participation tracks very well with past years and we are expecting to reach over 7,000 responses by the end of the month. Thank you also for spreading the word about our survey. The traffic on our survey website was very intense on April 1st and we apologize if any of you encountered difficulty or…
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2015-2016 Colony Loss and Management Survey Is Live: Take the Survey Today!
It is April 1st and that can only mean one thing at the Bee Informed Partnership – our National Loss and Management survey is LIVE! Starting now and continuing until April 30th, your responses from this survey provide invaluable information that helps us obtain a clear picture of honey bee health throughout the country and helps guide best management practices. Thank you for all the beekeepers who, for 10 years now, have taken the time to complete the Colony Loss survey. Additional appreciation goes to those beekeepers who have provided data for our Management survey for the past 5 years. Correlating management practices with colony…
National Colony Loss and Management 2015-2016 Survey
This is no April's fool! The 2015 - 2016 National Colony Loss and National Management Survey will be ready to accept submissions starting April 1st and continuing until April 30th. The results that are received from this survey provide invaluable information that helps us obtain a clear picture of honey bee health throughout the country. Without the aid of the many beekeepers who participate in this survey we would never be able to obtain the results that we have received in the past and hope to continue to receive in the future. If you would like to take an early peek at the 2015 –…
Sentinel Apiary Project
We are breaking ground in modern beekeeping. The stage is set and like most big problems, collaboration is key. As a Sentinel Apiary participant, you will get the tools and information you need to take your beekeeping group to the next level. By doing so you become a guardian of all bees in your region and together we will revolutionize beekeeping. Applications are now available for 2016 and we are seeking beekeeping groups that manage 8 or more stationary colonies. We will arm you with data from Disease Load Monitoring and a Hive Scale so you may combat the challenges of beekeeping. To aid in…
Why did my honey bees die?
Learning to identify a common cause of winter death in Northern Climates By Meghan Milbrath, Michigan State University Extension, March 8, 2016 Guest Blog Beekeepers in northern climates have already lost a lot of colonies this winter. While official counts won’t be recorded for a few months, some trends are starting to emerge. One of these trends is a specific type of colony death. In Michigan, I’ve received so many calls describing the scenario below, that I can describe the deadout before opening the hive, or before the beekeeper describes it over the phone. While I may impress some with these predictive powers, the…
JOIN THE P. APIUM PROJECT! – A CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECT TO TEST OUT A NEW HONEY BEE PROBIOTIC
Dr. Vanessa Corby-Harris from the USDA-ARS is currently enrolling participants in a study to look at the effects of a probiotic, Parasaccharibacter apium (or P. apium) on colony health. In both lab and small-scale field studies, she sees a potential benefit of P. apium to colony health. Bees supplemented with this bacterium can survive better in the lab and are more resistant to Nosema. Supplemented hives also show a slight trend of being stronger in the spring. If you are interested in participating or know someone who might be interested, please direct yourself to the project website. Participation can be anonymous and is free of…
Bee Informed Partnership Diagnosis and treatment of Common Honey Bee Diseases Wins Bronze!
At Apimondia this year our training manual for ‘Common honey bee diseases’ was submitted in the book category. This simple training manual was entered among many other highly competitive books and won a bronze award to our surprise! I originally wanted to create a honey bee disease/diagnosis manual because most of the literature had very small, poor quality photos which made disease identification difficult. So for the past 7 years I had been collecting images of the various bee diseases and pests I came across during colony inspections in Pennsylvania as well as in migratory operations around the country. In 2011, I moved to Northern…
Bee Informed Partnership Wins Silver for Website Category at Apimondia
At the 2015 Apimondia International Apiculture Congress in Daejon, Korea, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) took home the silver prize in the category for the Best Website on a Beekeeping Topic. This meeting of researchers and beekeepers from diverse backgrounds and from around the globe was the 44th meeting of Apimondia under the theme “Bees, Connecting the World!” Apimondia is an organization that promotes scientific, social, ecological and economic apicultural development throughout the world through the cooperation of beekeeping associations, scientific organizations and individuals throughout the world. Scientists, representing many countries from around the world, came to present their research projects, prominently displaying the diverse…
UMD Bees All Prepped for Joaquin!
The weather forecast doesn’t look too good for this weekend with hurricane Joaquin heading to the East Coast. In expectation of high winds and rain, we have prepped our colonies at University of Maryland as best we can. The action items here are: remove unused equipment, condense weight close to the ground, strap the boxes together (and even to the hive stand, if you can), weight the top cover and beware of floods. We reduced most of our colonies to 2 deeps high as we started feeding our colonies a couple of weeks ago. This is…
The Bee Informed Partnership National Management Survey 2014 – 2015
The results for the 2014 – 2015 Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) National Management Survey are posted. This survey was done in conjunction with the National Colony Loss Survey and represents the management practices of over 6,000 Beekeepers from across the country. Together, the beekeepers who took part in the survey collectively managed nearly 400,000 colonies representing about 14.5% of the 2.74 million colonies in the United States. We would like to give a big thanks to all of the beekeepers who participated in the survey – your participation is highly valued by the Bee Informed Partnership and other beekeepers who are able to review which…