Monday, April 2, 2018

Bee Informed Partnership by beekeeper Fred

Yesterday I received an email inviting me to submit 2017-2018 winter loss data to BIP.  I have put a link to this request below.  You may wish to submit your data. 

Prior to providing my data I took a closer look at their analysis of data submitted for prior years.  Surprisingly their data shows Wisconsin winter losses running at about 19% in the 2016-2017 winter season.  To me this seemed out of touch with the reality experienced by hobbyist Wisconsin beekeepers.  Looking a little deeper into the results it appears their analysis is driven by submittals by commercial beekeepers that do NOT winter their bees in Wisconsin.  Their data showed 85% of hives were wintered elsewhere; definitely not something a hobbyist beekeeper does.

Even if a lot of hobbyist beekeepers were to submit data I feel the commercial beekeeper data will always swamp our small numbers.

Other links show the prevalence of the various bee viruses in Wisconsin.  It appears that 8 out of 10 viruses are present in Wisconsin.

For the winter loss map use this link:
https://research.beeinformed.org/loss-map/

For viral prevalence use this link:
https://research.beeinformed.org/state_reports/viruses

To supply data for their survey use this link:
http://26.selectsurvey.net/beeinformed/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=LMS2018

1 comment:

Gerard said...

I did the full survey, and you're right, there should be data for bees wintered in Wisconsin, and a hobbyist category would be more informative.