The comments made clearly illustrate that any organization wanting to curate a research fund and make grants for research needs to do so via people who have legit academic credentials in the field of interest, or see the money frittered away.  

It is absolutely true that "few" applications for funding will offer any immediate benefit to the beekeepers contributing the fundage.  Why?  'cause your club or association isn't offering enough money to get from "square one" to "finished product".  

So, what to do with beekeeper-raised money? Be practical, and fund a PERSON, not a project.  Pick a researcher who has done work you appreciate, and buy that researcher a grad student for another year.  THAT's the best use of smaller amounts of money - don't throw the money away on one-shot "field trials" to answer some silly question like "Does Lemon Pledge kill Nosema?"  If you ask working researchers, the hardest thing to fund is "another year of a well-educated, up-to-speed existing grad student staff member".  It is a niche that is very nice, because you can add the money for a plane ticket and hotel room, and have that grad student come and give the association a presentation on what they did the year you were paying their salary.  

Another way to approach the issue is to break it down - ask the applicants to tell you what they'd do with $5K, with $25K, with $50K, and with $100K.  (I'll tell you now, $5K will fund a new machine or an upgrade, $25K will get them a grad student for a summer, $50K will fund an additional year of data collection on an existing study, and $100K MIGHT get something new started.  This is because bee-related stuff is perhaps the cheapest work one can do.  In physics, $5K buys one guy a round-trip ticket to a telescope in Chile or the Canaries and buys his meals while he is there.)

The generalized disparagements about beekeeping skill among "researchers" is nonsense.  There are hundreds of 9-year-old 4-H students who successfully keep bees with style and panache every single year, so let's not get too puffed-up about "beekeeping skill" as a prerequisite to solving our problems.  Remember that despite "beekeeping skill" it took more than a decade for anyone to notice that the gross morphology of the varroa mites killing bee colonies was actually an oblong beastie, (varroa destructor) rather than round (varroa jacobsonii).

The "Institutional Bee Research Establishment" is actually a subsidiary of a far broader conspiracy.  The Joanne and James Fischer World Domination Fund is a very tiny player in this vast confederation, which includes the Trilateral Commission, the Bohemian Grove Men's Association, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, Novus ord seclorum, the Rothschilds, Halliburton, General Dynamics Electric Boat Division, the Knights Templar, and Elaine's on 2nd Ave.

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