jan-feb-2020

THE BEE BOX The Year of Communication What a year! In 2019, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) kept growing, both in team members as in the data we are collecting. BIP is a non-profit organization built from the need to centralize honey bee health data to get insights into honey bee health and help improve colony survival. We are collecting data, from surveys and field samples, to provide information about honey bee health back to beekeepers to help them make informed decisions in a timely fashion. We are data driven, and we believe in sharing our data while protecting the privacy of our respondents (you can access anonymized results on our research portal). In January last year, we vowed to make 2019 the “year of data.” We were excited about the different streams of honey bee health data coming together and how we were starting to make sense of it all to answer questions that beekeepers care about. Looking back, we are proud of what we accomplished, as a team and with the support of our participating beekeepers. Here are a Few Highlights of the Year in Numbers: The honey bee colony health information BIP collects is archived in our database, now the largest repository of bee health metrics in the United States. With inspection notes, lab results, survey entries, hive scale readings and more, it represents over 1,700 MB of data, with on average 456 new records every day. View the interactive version: research.beeinformed.org/ bip-database-overview/ We collect various data types: samples taken from the field, which can be tested for different pests and diseases, including the pernicious Varroa mites, viral targets, as well as pesticides. Each of those samples are typically accompanied by field observations (such as colony size, queen status, brood pattern for example). More and more, those might also include management history of the colony. A relatively recent stream of data concerns sensor data, such as hive scales. Multiple brands of hive scales are marketed as “BIP-ready” in that they have the potential to be directly linked to our database so as to share the recorded information with our network in real-time. Participants can see their data, and anonymized data from other participants as comparison, to help them identify honey flows and consumption rates. IN YOUR ORCHARD 3 0 A L M O N D F A C T S