$246 is not a lot for bee research.  Bees are inherently difficult to study (can you setup 10 colonies, treat them identically and have them look/measure near identical data for a year?).
My wife and I probably spend more time than the average beekeeper tracking down and reading published studies, and it's frustrating due to how the publishing end has evolved.

No one wants to release any data without publication.  Publishers have to make money as well, so access to the publication is restricted to libraries/institutions that subscribe (or subscribe to groups of publications), or to those that are willing to pay a fee (usually about $30/article).

So, we end up with a system where studies that are funded by the govt (taxpayers), are not available for taxpayers to read until they are published, and even then, a citizen has to pay to read govt. research. (FOIA isn't much of a help here...
http://www.bc.edu/dam/files/schools/law/lawreviews/journals/bcealr/29_2/04_TXT.htm ).

There are ways around having to pay to read published studies (we often get things sent to us by study authors, by friends, and reference librarians at university libraries are usually more than helpful in our experience)....but it's not right to have to resort to such measures (that often involve copyright violations on someone's part).

The bigger problem is that until a publicly funded study gets published, those paying for the study (taxpayers) don't have access to the data or the results.  

On Bee-L, we recently were discussing some comments made in a film by 2 leading U.S. researchers about a study they concluded 2 years ago....funded by the ARS and the NAPPC.  This work has been paid for and completed, and the claims made by the researchers who performed this work are extraordinary...but we are not entitled to see the data or the study in any form.  In the meantime, there is quite a bit of related research that has begun in these 2 years (some by the same researchers), and not having the benefit of reading this completed study affects how beekeepers, researchers and environmentalists view the situation, how future studies are conducted, and what policies are enacted.

In my mind this is an unacceptable situation, and one that needs to be addressed before I start supporting the overall goal of "more money for bee research".

deknow

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