Dear all

The question of the "missing" beekeepers who are not known to the
authorities is an interesting one.  The National Audit Office (NAO) report
and the Bee Health strategy published yesterday
(http://www.defra.gov.uk/hort/Bees/news/plan.pdf) both refer to 33,000
beekeepers in England and Wales.  This number was produced in an earlier
report into UK bee health published in 2001.  The authors of that report did
not know how many beekeepers there were in the UK but finally they judged
(Guestimated) that 23% of the beekeepers with less than 40 colonies each
were not on the Bee Inspectors' Beebase database.  Based on the numbers
registered at that time they produced the 33,000 figure.  They do not appear
to say how many beekeepers were registered with the database, but at that
time beekeepers numbers in the UK had generally been in steady decline for
ten years or more.  It is quite likely that the number of beekeepers
registered was overstated by a significant amount-the authors of the 2001
report found errors exceeding 12% based on replies sent to a random
selection of beekeepers on the list, and this was just from the replies
received.  Former beekeepers who just discarded their letter were not
counted.

This number appears incredible now, as it implies in round figures that
there are two beekeepers keeping bees for every one that belongs to a
beekeeping association.  The NAO report gives the number of beekeepers in
England known to the Bee Inspectors' Beebase database as 15, 118.  Using the
23% figure as above would give an estimate of 19,693 beekeepers, with less
than 5,000 "missing" beekeepers.  This is a more plausible estimate for me.

The NAO report mentions the errors and innacuracies known to exist in the
Beebase list; one of the Bee Inspectors has started a drive to clean up the
list for his area, with considerable changes being made to the data as a
result.

There is a human factors element at work.  No one -neither the inspectors or
the beekeepers-has wanted to question the possibility of the numbers being
overstated for fear that the government would cut back on their expenditure.

Regards to all

Mike Rowbottom

HARROGATE
North Yorkshire
UK

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