USA Bee Keepers - Bee Informed Partnership

This arrived in my emails today - I have done the NBU-BBKA survey for the UK - See Bee Base and register if you have not already - this is for the Bee Keepers in US of A

Dear Beekeeper,

We need you! We know it is one of the busiest times of the year for beekeepers and we thank you for taking valuable time from your colonies to participate in the National Colony Loss and Management Survey created by the Bee Informed Partnership and sponsored by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Please go to our online survey at http://10.selectsurvey.net/beeinformed/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=BIP2016 and complete the survey there. It will be live on April 1st and close on April 30th. Please do not complete the survey more than once. Information about past Winter Loss and National Management Surveys and the annual reports can be found online at http://beeinformed.org/.

The Colony Loss Survey has evolved from our winter loss survey conducted 10 years ago. Now we monitor summer losses as well. Last year, for the first time in the history of this survey, beekeepers reported higher losses in the summer than in the winter. The National Management Survey is conducted annually in conjunction with the Colony Loss Survey. The two surveys are aimed at looking for relationships between colony losses and colony management (including disease treatment strategies, supplemental feeding, etc.) and/or other factors that may influence colony health (such as colony location, honey production, and forage type). Your participation in this research is voluntary and your responses will be kept confidential. In any publication or presentation resulting from this research, no personally identifiable information will be disclosed. We are also thrilled to release our Best Management Practices in the next few months. Please check back on our website soon for those exciting results!

Some of you may be contacted independently by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the USDA to participate in their first quarterly colony loss survey. We encourage all beekeepers contacted by NASS to answer both BIP and NASS surveys. But we need your responses!

If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at askbeeinformed@gmail.com. Once again thank you for your participation.

Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp
President, Bee Informed Partnership, Inc.

University of Maryland

Karen Rennich
Executive Director, Bee Informed Partnership, Inc.
University of Maryland