Mark Berninghausen said:


"That would be a leap, if not a stretch. What makes you think that folks that took one survey even knew about the other. I filled out the BIP Survey. I had no idea about the BeeWellness Survey. So I don't think it a good idea to extrapolate anything from something one makes an assumption about which we know is at least anecdotally untrue."


OK.  Let's not make the assumption, although one anecdotal account (the state assoc. president's) hardly makes the assumption untrue....that is a mathematical fact about statistics that we learned back in grade school! Nevertheless, picking up where I left off in that analysis WITHOUT my assumption, there is still a 27% loss in migratory hives relative to stationary ones. The overall NYS declared loss was 30% in 2014.  Even if ALL the "hobby hives" in the 2014 survey died, they cannot account for the total loss in hives that year, and they only offset the state average by 3%.  My point about the importance of looking at the data before drawing conclusions is still valid and I maintain that hobby beekeepers are not skewing the BIP data for NYS.

Christina

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