Pete


If you watch Julia's recorded video - she talks about all of this, and why she went from balloons and lures to mechanical drones.  She didn't do it just so she could buy an expensive mechanical toy.  
However, if one really wants a drone to fly, and one has to justify the cost, this is a good one.  For commercial beekeepers and queen breeders, this might even be deductible.

I agree that the old ways often work and are often simple, but I know that even Gerry Loper always wanted something better for studying mating behavior and locating DCAs.  In fact, he dialed in for Julia's talk in January, and he's been very helpful to her.

Is new always better, no!  Is expensive better, no!  But just as we gave up horse and buggy for cars and trucks,  the abacus for calculators, our land line phones for cell phones, and typewriters for word processors, things change and new ways of doing things are adopted as time passes and technology changes.

As per whether you are a Luddite, a Luddite was a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, which they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16).    Since you are retired, I think;   I doubt that you are worried about your job.


However, it should be noted that the term Luddite has been more commonly used since the 1950s when technology and industrialization prevailed. Luddite in modern times refers to a technologically conservative person who is not comfortable with the overwhelming boom of electronic devices.


How much information about new technologies for beekeeping did you include in the new ABC?  I haven't seen the revision. I don't remember you asking.  I do know that since 2012, bee and colony monitoring, research, and management technologies have gone from six investigators/firms in 2012, to about 30 in 2014, more than 60 in 2018, and we just had 50 speakers out of 100 invited speakers from companies and universities participate in our Oct 5-9, 2020 4th International Bee and Hive Monitoring Conference - from 14 countries.  As with any change in basic paradigms, which and to what degree these new technologies will be incorporated into research, beekeeping, bee management remains to be seen.  But there's no denying the rate of growth with respect to moving towards data driven bee management.

My comment to Bee-L about getting up to speed with 2021 was based on the Bee-L discussion revisiting the same old, same old studies, approaches, when for the first time, Julia and some other are showing that there are new, readily available tools.  Run over to Best Buy, get a drone with a camera that has GPS, and start locating DCAs, studying mating, and getting some cool video.  Research can be fun.

And please, watch her video before rendering critical comments.  

Jerry B

P.S.  I like toys, but I wore glasses until I had cataract surgery to see.  I'm not necessarily enamored of technology.  I stuck with glasses because contact lens irritated my eye and didn't help with my allergies.  I skipped Lasik s because I knew too many folks who were early adopters and it went bad.  As per bee-related technologies, I'm convinced that some will fail, some will go broke, some will just never catch on, but we're seeing too many groups working on bee management tools, to expect that beekeeping won't go like cereal crops, dairy, and other agriculture to some form of precision agriculture.

Frank Linton's and my efforts have been to highlight who's doing what, so that people can see what's emerging, make information decisions.  As of Oct 5, we've got 50 videos for folks to watch - all on the UM Online Beekeeping Web site  Go to:  https://www.umt.edu/sell/programs/bee/monitoringconference_2020/default.php.  

Those who registered for the Conference had first access. almost all of the videos and abstracts are now posted on the UM Beekeeping Site and YouTube Channel.  We're still working on a couple of labeling issues - abstract titles didn't exactly match video titles, and I have one abstract, out of 50, that I'm still missing.

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