We've been asked by Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota's Bee Research Team to post the following. Please share this with any beekeepers that you know. - Worker Bee

Dear Friends,

We are leading the effort for a nationwide beekeeping effort called
The Bee informed Partnership, a joint project among numerous
universities and laboratories.

I’d like to ask you to please send the following email to all the
beekeepers that you know and encourage them to participate in this
effort.  Both surveys are open only from 30 March through 20 April
2012.

 Should you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to
contact the project at: askbeeinformed@gmail.com or call us at
443.296.2470.

You can learn more about the Bee Informed Partnership at
www.beeinformed.org.  Thank you for your time, help and participation.

We really believe this effort will be able to change our industry by
giving beekeepers the tools they need to make informed management
decisions. But, for it to work it needs participation – lots of
participation. SO please pass the letter below to your beekeeper
contacts and encourage them to participate!

*****************************************
Dear Beekeeper:

We need your help.  Please take 20 minutes out of your busy day to
complete these two surveys.  Both surveys are only open from 30 March
2012 through 20 April 2012.

1) National Winter Loss and Management Survey:

http://participate.beeinformed.org/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=76KI4p3

The winter loss survey should take less than 5 minutes and the
management survey should take less than 20 minutes.

The purpose of the Bee Informed Partnership is to use beekeepers' real
world experiences to help solve beekeepers' real world problems. We
will use the data generated from these two surveys to help you decide
which management practices are best for beekeepers like you, who live
where you do and have operations similar to yours.  For this to work,
we need as many participants as possible...so please take the time to
fill out the questionnaire and SEND THIS EMAIL TO ALL THE BEEKEEPERS
YOU KNOW asking them to fill out these questionnaires too.

You can see what type of results we will generate by visiting the
www.beeinformed.org website and browsing through our results section.
Currently we are in the process of posting last year’s management
results, so visit the site often to see these results as they are
posted and discussed in our BLOG section.

Depending on the number of participants we hope to have the results
from this year’s survey broken down by region and should have those
results posted within months of the survey close date now that we have
built the infrastructure needed to automate report generation.

Should you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to
contact us at askbeeinformed@gmail.com or call us at 443.296.2470.

You can learn more about the Bee Informed Partnership at www.beeinformed.org.

BE INVOLVED, BE INCLUDED, BEE INFORMED.

Thank you,


The Bee Informed Partnership Team