Quoting PLB:

"the law is being snuck past the beekeeping public. We have not been
consulted on this at all. The same exact scenario played out several years
ago, mandatory registration was snuck into law and the state association
mounted the time and labor consuming effort to have it repealed, since the
majority of beekeepers did not want it. Why did they not want it? Because
NYS has had a long history of heavy handed and capricious bee inspection.
Neighboring Pennsylvania has the model program. Everything the NYS
government gets into, turns to crap."

Peter's summation is far too generous.  
NYS has a long history of outright empire building in Ag and Markets, and
beekeepers are not just the tail being wagged by the big dog of
"stakeholders", beekeepers are a mere tic on the tail being wagged.

Just fer example, the "Apiary Advisory Committee" contained exactly ONE
beekeeper when the "same exact scenario played out several years ago".  The
rest of the members were people who were overt pesticide users, so the
presidential-mandated funds to address pesticide use and misuse were
dribbled away on a process so presumptuous as to tell beekeepers that they
needed to follow "best practices" that read as if they had been drafted by a
5th-grader.  

The punch line was that beekeepers were expected to "register their yards",
and would be given "24 hours notice" to move hives in the event that
spraying was planned.  Never mind that the closest men and truck might be
hundreds of miles away, and fully loaded with hives that needed to be
several hundred miles further away by the same night.

I have traveled a lot, and seen a lot of corruption and outright evil.  NYS
Ag and Markets evinced a level of technical incompetence combined with guile
not seen since Yahya Jammeh, overthrown president of The Gambia, decided
several years ago that the way to rebuild a dysfunctional economy was
"beekeeping", but only in the context of his personal ownership of every
hive, with the actual beekeepers being "sharecroppers" of one sort or
another.  The various funding sources had different ideas about "hive
ownership".

Like the NY State meetings, the travel time was annoying, the committee was
clueless, and I bailed on the project when I found that my personal
tolerance for overt evil was exceeded.  Jammeh ranked up there with the
Duvaliers (Papa Doc, Baby Doc) of Haiti in terms of his attempts to shovel
foreign aid into his own pockets, but he was also delusional and insane -
not exaggerating even a little bit.

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