Annual Beekeeping Survey—Please Participate

If you're already keeping bees in the U.S., please take a moment to complete this year's survey on how your hives are doing, to enable the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to compile a nationwide picture of what the heck is going on with our bees.

The deadline for turning in this simple survey is Friday, April 17th, 2009.

Unfortunately, the survey is not available in an online format (don't ask me why), but you can cut and paste the questions into an email, answer them, and e-mail your responses to: beeloss@gmail.com

According to the PR sent around earlier this week from the folks at Bee Culture:

The information you provide will be entered into a spreadsheet and will not be attached to your name or address in any way. In addition to this e-mail survey, you may be contacted by phone and asked the same questions. Please provide answers to both if you are asked to do so – but mention to the phone interviewer that you have already answered the questions via email.

The results of this survey will be compiled and published so that everyone can see how bees are doing in the United States. These results, along with those from the past two years, will be used to secure research funding and assistance for Bee health.

Be sure to send your survey response to the email provided above prior to April 17, 2009. And please feel free to pass this along to your beekeeping buddies—the more beekeepers participate, the more complete a picture can be gathered about what is happening to our honeybees, and why.

The survey questions are as follows:

1. In what state(s) and county(s) do you keep your hives? If you keep hives in more than one state or county, please answer questions 2-9 separately by location.

2. How many hives did you have alive in September 2008?

3. How many hives are alive now (March/April 2009)?

4. How many splits, increases, and/or colonies did you make/buy since September 2008?

5. What percentage of loss, over this time period, would you consider acceptable?

6. What percentage of your hives that died had no dead bees in the hive or in the apiary?

7. To what do you attribute the cause of death for the hives that died?

8. What percentage of your hives did you send to CA for almond pollination?

9. How many times, on average, did you move your colonies last year?

Download the reports from previous years here (winter 06-07) and here (winter 07-08).