Beelog

The Beekeeper’s Handbook : Diana Sammataro, Alphonse Avitabile, Dewey M. Caron: Books

The Beekeeper’s Handbook 4th Edition by Diana Sammataro Editor’s Note: “One of the great frustrations for all of us at some point is, regarding life as a human, there’s no manual. But not so for bee keeping! This book is the bible for us beeks and we have all turned these pages – in curiosity and when
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Audacious Idea Ten: Designing Managed Landscapes for Bees

Audacious Idea Ten: Designing Managed Landscapes for Bees By Neal Williams My vision for bees in managed lands is to create landscapes that are more beneficial to bees and also other aspects of the ecosystem. My vision for pollination is (unsurprisingly) for a broadly integrated approach that recognizes opportunities to use wild pollinators more effectively and
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Audacious Idea Nine: A New Alliance

Audacious Idea Nine: A New Alliance By William Klett As panic and deperation begin to take hold in the face of low commodity prices, there is talk of taking up the next farm bill in the near term. Whether or not this happens, whenever the next one is being drawn up, an alliance of beekeepers,
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Audacious Idea Eight: Addressing Pesticide Abuse

Addressing Pesticide Abuse Chas Mraz   Main Entry: au·da·cious Pronunciation: o-‘dA-sh&s Function: adjective Etymology: Middle French audacieux, from audace boldness, from Latin audacia, from audac-, audax bold, from audEre to dare, from avidus eager — more at AVID Date: 1550 1 a : intrepidly daring : ADVENTUROUS <an audacious mountain climber> b : recklessly bold
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Audacious Idea Seven: Crowdfunding to Mitigate Financial Risks of New Approaches

by Heather Mattila Financial risk is one of the biggest challenges beekeepers face when confronted with the opportunity to assess and radically adjust their beekeeping practices. Risk can take many forms, such as potential colony losses when selecting for stress-tolerant bees or the infrastructure costs of diversifying the number of managed species in a pollinator
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Audacious Idea Six: Got to be cruel to be kind

Audacious Idea Six Stephen Martin Got to be cruel to be kind Beekeepers whether hobbyists or running large commercial operations never like to lose bees, or worse still, colonies. Based on economic reasoning or simply the love of the honeybee, small ‘failing colonies’ are typically united or strengthen by the introduction of frames of brood.
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Audacious Idea Five: Breed for Disease Resistance & Focus on Commercial Beekeepers

Breed for Disease Resistance & Focus on Commercial Beekeepers Francis Ratnieks According to Aizen and Harder (2009) the number of managed honey bee colonies worldwide increased 45% in the latter half of the 20th century. At the same time African honey bees spread across tropical and sub-tropical America resulting in tens of millions of additional
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Apis Mellifera collecting pollen

Audacious Idea Four: Small Hive Beekeeping

Small Hive Beekeeping By Tom Seeley Perhaps my idea is no longer terribly audacious, given the growing interest in “natural beekeeping”, but it is that we embrace another way of keeping bees besides the standard approach of managing colonies to be 1) as large as possible, 2) as disinclined to swarm as possible, and 3) as
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Audacious Idea Three: A Matter of Scale

Small AND Large Scale Beekeeping by Marla Spivak With time, there could be a separation of bee stocks and management practices between large-scale and small-scale beekeepers. For example, small-scale beekeepers could rely on locally and regionally bred stocks (and swarms collected from Tom Seeley’s small colonies!), and end their reliance on queens, package bees and
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Audacious Idea Two: A new model for funding and conducting bee research

AUDACIOUS IDEA TWO  J.L. FRAZIER I would like to suggest that we develop a new model for funding and conducting bee research that will result in increased efficiency of funding and enhancing the impacts of results on public understanding and policy. The federal funding of academic research has become so burdensome that researchers have too little
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