We invite you and others in the Hive Tracks community to participate in three online surveys that assess:
- beekeepers’ knowledge on the main honey bee diseases (Nosema, AFB and EFB and Varroa);
- how beekeepers prevent the main honeybee diseases by adopting good practices;
- beekeeper’s knowledge on the risk to induce antimicrobial resistance as a consequence of overuse or misuse of antimicrobial products.
This is part of the global effort to evaluate beekeepers’ understanding of good beekeeping practices and proper use of medicines at the apiary level. Your feedback will help identify priorities for supporting beekeepers and making beekeeping more sustainable worldwide.
These surveys are elaborated and conducted by the Appalachian State University within the context of the EU-funded project BPractices, with the technical support of Apimondia, the Animal Production and Health Division of FAO and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale del Lazio e della Toscana.
You can respond to all or any one of the surveys by clicking on the link below:
http://www.fao.org/teca/forum/beekeeping/en/
We appreciate your time and consideration in joining your fellow beekeepers around the world in this effort. Please forward this request to any of your beekeeping friends, clubs, and organizations and post on social media channels to extend the reach and make this survey a success.
Regards, The HiveTracks Team
AND ANOTHER SURVEY REQUEST……….
Exchange Group on Beekeeping
The TECA Beekeeping Exchange Group was created in 2010 in collaboration with the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations (Apimondia) to address the need for a central online place for storing and sharing reliable information on beekeeping for smallholder beekeepers.
Beekeeping is widely practiced in the world as an income generating activity and for the benefits that bees and their products offer to mankind. Access to reliable and validated information can help producers to improve their activities and livelihoods.
The TECA exchange group gathers people, organizations and institutions with different expertise or interest in beekeeping to share information, knowledge, and experiences, to learn from each other and to the network.
THE EXCHANGE GROUP AIMS TO:
- provide a space to share experiences, challenges and questions related to beekeeping;
- offer reliable and technical information validated by experts that can help beekeepers in their activities;
- facilitate knowledge sharing and networking among stakeholders (associations/cooperatives, beekeepers, NGOs, research institutes, etc.)
- identify gaps and needs for the co-creation of solutions, and opportunities for scaling up technologies and practices in the beekeeping sector
- collect ideas and information through surveys and moderated discussion.
ONGOING SURVEYS……….
Surveys on good beekeeping practices and proper use of medicines at the apiary level
The use of veterinary medicines can be reduced through the proper application of good beekeeping practices. Good hive management practices, when properly implemented, promote healthy colonies, and guide the beekeeper to identify timely clinical signs of disease thereby preventing the spread of the pathogens. Working with healthy, strong colonies should always be the objective of the beekeeper, and is the basis for a sustainable beekeeping sector.
Good beekeeping practices also include the proper use of medicines by the beekeeper. The improper use of medicines or antimicrobials for the treatment of infectious diseases such as Nosema, American Foulbrood (AFB), and European Foulbrood (EFB) or parasitic diseases such as Varroa, could lead to inefficacy of the treatments as the pathogens can develop resistance to the treatment (“antimicrobial resistance”). In addition, the misuse of medicines, especially if home-made or those not registered for the use with bees, can impact the quality of the hive products like honey, royal jelly, pollen, propolis, bees and wax, generating residues of pesticides or antimicrobials that may be hazardous for the consumers.
The risk of residues of veterinary medicines in honeybee products and the risk of developing antimicrobial resistance at the apiary level motivated FAO, under the technical supervision of Apimondia and IZSLT, to launch 3 surveys aiming to assess:
- beekeepers’ knowledge on the main honey bee diseases (Nosema, AFB and EFB and Varroa);
- how beekeepers prevent the main honeybee diseases by adopting good practices;
- beekeeper’s knowledge on the risk to induce antimicrobial resistance as a consequence of the overuse or misuse of antimicrobial products.
These surveys are elaborated and conducted by the Appalachian State University within the context of the EU-funded project BPractices, with the technical support of Apimondia, the Animal Production and Health Division of FAO and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale del Lazio e della Toscana.
We warmly invite you to respond to all or any one of these surveys:
It will take approximately 5 to 10 minutes to complete each survey and answers are anonymous. Honest replies will contribute to a realistic assessment of beekeepers’ knowledge and help governments to respond to their real needs.
Translation in Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish of the surveys will be accessible on the surveys’ pages by clicking on the language drop-down list at the top of the page.
The results of the surveys will be used to help governments and industry in providing adequate support to the beekeeping sector in order to fight the spread of the diseases and prevent antimicrobial resistance in beekeeping. The results of the surveys will be shared on TECA through a moderated discussion, which will be organized on TECA’s Forum by the end of 2019.
One respondent per continent will be randomly chosen by a computerized system and receive a price donated by Apimondia!
The price consists of beekeeping equipment and beekeeping related publications produced by Apimondia. Respondents wanting to participate in the prize draw should tick the relevant “price draw box” in the surveys and communicate their email addresses so that the winners can be contacted by email by 20 December 2019. Those who have responded to one or any of the surveys already and would still want to qualify for the prize draw should send an email to TECA@fao.org.
