Hi All,
Project Apis m (PAm) is a six-year old nonprofit established to fund
beekeeping research, using donations from beekeepers, almond growers, and
grants from organizations such as Häagen-Dazs and recently, Monsanto (a
large grant to develop bee forage on ag lands). To date, PAm has funded
some 40 projects to the tune of $2.4 million. The results have been
presented at the national beekeeping conventions and published in
scientific journals.
We recently had five excellent proposals submitted, but do not have enough
cash on hand to fund them all. I suggested that we try "crowdsourcing" to
come up with the funds, targeting all the small beekeeping clubs. I'm
guessing that there are somewhere between 100 and 1000 such clubs in the
U.S. If each club were to donate $500, that would generate some serious
money for bee research!
Many members of the List belong to local beekeeping clubs. I'm asking you
to put a request to donate to PAm on the agenda of your next meeting.
The current research projects that we'd like to fund are:
1. A continuation of the pesticide analysis cost-share program run by Dr.
Maryann Frazier. PAm donates $100 to offset part of the cost of testing
each bee or pollen sample submitted by beekeepers for pesticide analysis.
This information is then put into a database for use by researchers,
beekeepers, and EPA (cost $15,000).
2. Following upon his research of last year, Dr. Reed Johnson has a
proposal to test for the effects of the fungicides and insect growth
regulators used during almond bloom upon the development of worker and
queen brood. The expense of pesticide analyses runs the cost up to
$134,000.
3. Dr. Brian Johnson has proposed to validate the accuracy of the IVDS
machine (developed by Dr. Charles Wick) at identifying bee viruses. If
validated, the IVDS machine would allow rapid and inexpensive virus
analysis for beekeepers and researchers (a number of us currently send
samples for analysis) ($34,755).
4. Dr. David Tarpy has a one-time chance to purchase a refurbished machine
that will allow him to rapidly and cheaply determine the viability of semen
in queens and drones. This will allow him to work with the Bee Informed
Partnership to try to figure out why so many beekeepers are reporting queen
problems ($29,480).
5. And finally, Dr. Jonathan Engelsma is trying to set up a pilot project
using a hive scale network across the country to track and model colony
survivorship and disease outbreaks based on real-time hive weight data
($22,140).
Your bee club could either give an unrestricted donation, which would go
toward funding of any or all of the above, or you could specify which
project(s) you support. PAm is also happy to receive donations from
businesses that support honey bee research--please be creative in helping
us to fund these researchers!
--
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com
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