With respect to the comments from Ames Farms: I agree with many of the
comments made about the Bee Alert and AIA surveys.
If you read our full report, we admit up front that our Bee Alert Bee Loss
survey is primarily aimed at identifying trends and correlations, looking for
patterns. It is not, as you pointed out, unbiased -- which we say in the
report.
We are trying to find out what beekeepers are doing, seeing. What's
different between a beekeeper who has the problem versus one that has not. Where
have the bees been, where moved -- is something transferring with the bees?
What queen lines are being used? What treatments? We're looking for clues, not
trying to get an absolute number of lost bees.
In an ideal world, someone would be conducting the random survey you
mentioned -- and that was one of the Congressional requests covered in today's
testimony-- set up a national stats program that considers issues such as bee loss.
That said, the AIA report is useful, but limited in other ways -- their
method was: each state bee inspector, or person charged with apiary, call 15
beekeepers that he/she considers to be representative of the state's beekeepers.
Please choose 5 large, 5 medium/sideline, and 5 hobby beekeepers. That's
not a random survey.
Problems with this approach, many states no longer have an state inspector.
So, we've surveys from states not part of the AIA -- and CCD seems to be
patchy - hitting different regions at different times of the year. Also, many
of our respondents stipulated that we NOT inform, share data with their state
inspector,
We've numerous calls from state officials wanting to know who has CCD and
where in their state - seems we have reports that they don't. Unfortunately,
we can't release this inform without violating confidentiality. On the other
hand, most of our respondents gave us their name and phone number, and we've
had many informative follow up conversations/interviews.
Lesson learned, neither survey approach is likely to be unbiased. Remember
also, both AIA and ourselves are doing this mainly on our own nickel - we've
no funds to mail out random surveys, etc. - but we'd surely like to be able
to do so. We also can't get lists of registered beekeepers from many states
without going through a laborious and time consuming access process.
Our on-line approach produced some quickly gathered, useful (at least to
us), initial information. The press coverage in the bee journals and other
media has resulted in a surge of surveys -- we've doubled numbers in last two
weeks. Now we're getting the faxed forms, whereas the first group were mainly
e-mail or on-line submissions. That said, the current results now seem to fit
what we've seen in all of the state's that we've visited in the east, south,
and west. Our first 221 surveys were obviously biased toward small
operations without a problem. The later surveys are indicating more severe problems
and were received from larger operations.
Finally, be careful of reading the two reports and comparing percentages.
Diana says 17% loss is considered normal by beekeepers -- our survey does not
indicate any real difference here. In fact, I'm surprised to find beekeepers
who think 50% loss or greater is normal. Our respondents would have
considered 17% to be low or average bee loss. Diana also says that the AIA survey
found that approximately one-quarter of the responding beekeepers suffered
CCD.
Our data differs here mainly in the observation that as severity of loss
goes up, so does the proportion of beekeepers reporting CCD. The 41.2% of
beekeepers reporting severe losses to us did not all attribute all of their
losses to CCD - please look at Table 5 - you can read off the CCD numbers for
low, average, moderate, and severe loss, and for bee operations ranging from
less than 100 to more than 10,000 colonies. And remember, nearly half of our
respondents had not had any unusual bee losses.
Finally, you say that the numbers from either survey seem high from your
perspective in MN. That's surprising considering the number of surveys
documenting losses that we've received from MN. I suggest you talk to the MN
beekeeper who testified today. And, I'd argue that the real issue is bee losses,
which affect the bottom line for beekeepers and growers - it doesn't matter so
much what kills them, if losses are widespread and severe. Talk to a
beekeeper facing a loss on the scale of $1.2 M for this year alone, and you get a
reality check. I certainly did. They may be able to suck it up this year, but
most can't do it again next year.
Jerry
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