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registration was snuck into law and the state association mounted the time and labor consuming effort to have it repealed, since the majority of beekeepers did not want it.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. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html