So what's the alternative? How do we get *any* data then to even talk about?

Until someone or some agency decides to spend major mullah on a national survey ala the US census and applies rigorous statistical analysis tools to determine appropriate sampling levels, etc., what other information do we have?

I just took the survey for the first time - it didn't take as much time as estimated, but that's personal skill level with browser forms and how handy is your data. I can definitely see its appeal to hobbyists like me, but if I had thousands of hives under management, unless I already had the data cataloged and handy, this would be a problem. I can see how if someone from outside work attempted to contact me about my day job and ask me to take a survey about how many millions lines of code I process or frequency of my product builds I would be the first one to tell them to take a hike.

On the other hand, my software is not disappearing without my knowledge, so no one would be interested anyway, but bees do and I don't think that we have a very good handle on that.

Maybe Charles is right: it's always been like that (the historical data quoted on this forum are eye opening) and we should just blame the easy dissemination of such data via the internet and the click-bait approach of modern media to 'news reporting'.

Przemek

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