Pat said:

> there was a statement made by another committee member 
> that small time beekeepers should have no say in matters.

It has been thus in many places.  

I hear that it recently happened in Alberta, for example, resulting in two
separate organizations.

It is common for a modern beekeeping operation to have dozens of full-time
employees, and a sunk-capital investment of several million dollars.  The
commercial beekeepers are always worried that the "hobbyists will take
over", and make choices that would not be "good for business".  NY has far
smaller "commercial" operations, but the emotions are the same.

It is fear that is behind this view - fear that one's operation will be
surrounded and outnumbered by amateurs, incompetent and/or indifferent as to
their impact they can have on the livelihood of the for-profit operation.
(Note that I did not type "professional".  Professionalism is not an
exclusive attribute of someone in beekeeping for the money.  The barriers to
entry in beekeeping are nearly zero, while the barriers to success are
almost infinite.)

Here in NY, the motivation seems to be to demand registration, and
eventually, to collect fees from all beekeepers (or get tax dollars
allocated based upon an accurate count from mandatory registration), and end
up with a hobbyist-funded or taxpayer-funded program where some small
benefits will "trickle down" to the hobbyists as a result of addressing the
needs of the "commercial" operations.  So, someone wants something for
nothing in an age of austerity.  

Historically speaking, the most common scenario is that mandatory
registration is the camel's nose in the tent, and it does not take long to
start charging a fee for the mandatory registration, and so on.  This is why
we were so emphatic that the NYC regulatory language use the word
"notification", not "registration".  If one is required to notify the city,
the obligation ends when they do so, and the City cannot demand a fee from
anyone for complying with the requirement.  I expect the bureaucrats to
consistently conflate the two terms whenever possible, and eventually, to
try and slip in a wording change.   

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