>What I would find to be far more valuable than self-reported surveys, would
be reporting on demo apiaries using best management practices....

Amen to that! We have had this discussion many times going back to the initiation of BIP. Self reported surveys are notoriously inaccurate. Even if the loss percentages were accurate (I don't believe they are for the reasons noted in other posts) the survey can only be interpreted as a measure of beekeeper competency. Incompetent or indifferent beeks have huge loss's every year. I often hear "I treated and did everything right and my bees died". They want to ascribe the loss to some cosmic calamity beyond human intervention. In perhaps 95% of the cases they did not do everything right. Once in a while unexplained large loss's happen, as we have also discussed, but not often. Varroa is by far the major problem followed by starvation, queen issues, nutrition both natural and supplemented, pesticide exposure, and weather. For commercial operations it is further complicated by having to add cost benefit analysis.  All of those can be mitigated by careful husbandry. It's called beekeeping.

Studying the practices of a few successful beekeepers both large and small in various climatic regions by accurate outside observation would help develop a really useful set of BMPs. That in turn would make it possible for any beekeeper to bring their loss's down to comparable levels. Informally it is happening all the time, here, on the "grapevine", and in the literature. Information is available for those willing to dig but we lack a recognized authority with scientifically justified instructions on what works for those with consistently low loss in operating environments that one is interested in. Funding for such a service is a problem for those a lot smarter than me but I believe the information would be a lot more helpful then the statistics we are getting now that mostly generate sensational headlines and are open to endless second guessing.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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