CATCH THE BUZZ – There’s Industry Money To Be Had For Honey Bee Health Research. Check This Out!

Project Apis m. and the National Honey Board Announce a Request for Research Proposals to Support and Enhance Honey Bee Health.

 Salt Lake City, Utah, September 23, 2019 – Scientific research provides us with the foundation of knowledge we rely on in order to understand honey bee health threats and address them.

Project Apis m. and the National Honey Board are requesting research proposals to support and enhance honey bee health. Proposals will be accepted between September 23, 2019 and October 23, 2018. Please visit www.ProjectApism.org/rfps to view the full RFP.

In June, 2016 Project Apis m. (PAm) and the National Honey Board (NHB) announced that PAm would begin administering the NHB Production Research funds in 2017. This collaboration has streamlined efforts to support the beekeeping industry, by merging the NHB research funding opportunities with several other efforts coordinated by PAm. This collaboration allows opportunities to consider a broader spectrum of efforts linked to supporting the industry, to support collaborations and synergy, and harmonize and access deeper resources when necessary for projects that need larger time or money commitments. Merging efforts has also resulted in one less round of work for all of our hardworking bee researchers who write proposals, the scientific reviewers who read them, and selection committees and administrators who see these processes through.

 The National Honey Board (NHB) is an industry-funded agriculture promotion group that educates consumers about the benefits and uses of honey and honey products. NHB research, marketing and promotional programs are funded by an assessment on domestic and imported honey and are designed to increase awareness and usage of honey by consumers, the foodservice industry and food manufacturers. For more information please visit www.honey.com

Project Apis m. (PAm) is the largest nongovernmental, non-profit honey bee research organization in the USA. Established by beekeepers and almond growers in 2006, PAm bridges industry needs with efforts by top researchers and scientists and has infused nearly $8 million into honey bee research to support and enhance honey bee health and pollination security. In addition to funding a variety of research projects, PAm programs supplement bee forage in agricultural landscapes, and PAm supports graduate students through scholarships to encourage their pursuit of science-based solutions to honey bee challenges. For more information please visit www.projectapism.org

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Every six weeks Victoria state apiarist Joe Riordan checks a sentinel hive at Australia’s Port Melbourne.

Riordan is looking for something he hopes to never find – Varroa destructor.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. reports the threat is getting increasingly higher.

A little more than a year ago a ship arriving from the United States reported dead bees. Riordan and a team from Agriculture Victoria found Varroa mite inside a crate.

Australia is the last inhabited continent on Earth that is free of the mite that spreads viruses crippling bees’ ability to fly, gather food or emerge from their cell to be born.

To counter, each sentinel hive has a pest strip that will kill the Varroa.

“Holding off something the size of a match head isn’t easy, given we have increased container movement in Australia,” Riordan says. “The risk is just getting higher and higher every day.”

The ABC says Riordan enlisted beekeepers from around Victoria to help test all the hives for Agriculture Victoria’s emergency response team.

“There’s a sense of, ‘well look, I’m a beekeeper, what I want to do is help,” he says. I’m not going to stand back and hope it’s going to work, I want to be part of the team that actually beats it’,” he says.

Melbourne beekeeper Nic Dowse tells the broadcaster this time is “the last continental-scale golden age of beekeeping on Earth.”

It’s a time when beekeepers from overseas come to Australia to see what it’s like to work without Varroa.

Dowse says it’s important beekeepers register their hives and join a local club.“There are a lot that aren’t registered … and don’t know how to identify what the diseases are,” he says.

The ABC says if Varroa mite breaks the sentinel hives in Port Melbourne, it’ll jump bee-to-bee, hive-to-hive, out of the city and into the country to the commercial beekeepers and their thousands of hives.

Riordan and his team are preparing for that worst-case scenario — if Varroa comes in high summer when the bees are flying fast and far.

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