John Klepps, FL tech team lead, assessing a colony in the hot sun of Texas, Photo courtesy of the Bee Informed Partnership, Inc.
Karen Rennich, Executive Director
The Bee Informed Partnership
The Bee Informed Partnership is proud to announce the start of a new technical transfer team in Michigan beginning May 2017. This will be the 6th regional team and will service migratory and honey producing commercial beekeepers in that area. Some of these commercial operations travel to CA for almond pollination and many include Florida in their route for overwintering, requeening and creating splits in addition to honey production in Michigan. It is a sister team to our already existing Florida team since the migratory routes greatly overlap. This is true also, of our Midwest (MN/ND) and Texas team. Many beekeepers travel the same paths to move to safe overwintering yards that enable them to get a jump start on the season in the winter where it would be far too cold to requeen or make splits in Michigan or North Dakota in March. Florida and Texas are warmer and allow the bees to build up for other early pollination events before honey production kicks in later in the summer.
Our Michigan team will be hosted at Michigan State University and will be part of Dr. Meghan Milbrath’s lab. Meghan is the coordinator of the Michigan Pollinator Initiative at Michigan State University and wrote one of our most widely read and recirculated blogs last year. We are proud and excited to move into that part of the country and work with the Michigan beekeepers. The commercial operations in Michigan have already been very receptive to BIP and we had the opportunity to sample a few of their operations in Florida in November of 2016 to give them a feel for what BIP does and the type of services we can provide.
