To my fellow beekeepers,
While we have a lot of great honey bee research going on at our state universities, I am greatly impressed by the work of a group called the Bee Informed Partnership or BIP. Based at the University of Maryland, one of the primary roles of the BIP programs is collecting and analyzing information of honey bee health and colony losses, including management practices that may contribute to better health of our colonies. One of the important tools of this data collection are annual surveys of winter colony losses and management practices. I encourage ALL beekeepers to participate in these surveys. The surveys can be filled out on line, the first survey – on colony winter losses – will take about 10 minutes to complete, the second survey – on management practices – will take less than 30 minutes to complete. You may take the shorter survey, without taking the longer management practices survey, but I encourage you to complete both surveys.
The data collection for this year’s survey ends on April 30th, so act soon. I’ve attached a letter below from the Bee Informed Partnership Team, which includes more information and survey links.
You may also visit the BIP webpage (askbeeinformed@gmail.com) for more information about their work, including data results from past surveys.
Phil
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Dear Beekeeper:
We need your help. Please take 20 minutes out of your busy day to complete these two surveys. Both surveys are only open from 1 April through 30 April 2014.
Please click on the link below or paste it into your browser to participate in the National Winter Loss and Management Survey:
http://10.selectsurvey.net/beeinformed/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=BIP2014
The winter loss survey should take less than 10 minutes and the management survey should take less than 30 minutes.
The purpose of the Bee Informed Partnership is to use beekeepers’ real world experiences to help solve beekeepers’ real world problems. We will use the data generated from these two surveys to help you decide which management practices are best for beekeepers like you, who live where you do and have operations similar to yours. For this to work, we need as many participants as possible…so please take the time to fill out the questionnaire and SEND THIS EMAIL TO ALL THE BEEKEEPERS YOU KNOW asking them to fill out these questionnaires too.
You can see what type of results we will generate by visiting the Beeinformed.org website and browsing through our results section. Currently we are in the process of posting last year’s management results, so visit the site often to see these results as they are posted and discussed in our BLOG section.
Depending on the number of participants we will have the results from this year’s survey broken down by region and should have those results posted within months of the survey close date now that we have built the infrastructure needed to automate report generation.
Should you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us at askbeeinformed@gmail.com or call us at 443.296.2470.
You can learn more about the Bee Informed Partnership at beeinformed.org.
BE INVOLVED, BE INCLUDED, BEE INFORMED.
Thank you,
The Bee Informed Partnership Team