UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Penn State Center for Pollinator Research is recruiting beekeepers from Pennsylvania and surrounding states to assist in research on how landscape features affect the quality of apiaries.
The Landscapes for Bee Project will inform land managers, growers and beekeepers about how to find and create optimum resources for bees.
"It is very clear that, no matter how well you take care of your honey bees, they survive better in some locations than others," said Christina Grozinger, director of the Center for Pollinator Research. "However, doing research to understand how location affects bee health is incredibly challenging, since we need to be able to evaluate a very large number of sites to get reliable data. Thus, we are hoping to create a partnership with a large network of beekeepers from urban, agricultural and rural areas to address these questions comprehensively."
The location of an apiary, a collection of beehives, has long been known to play a role in colony productivity and survival. However, little research has been done to understand which aspects of "location" are important for bee health. Beekeepers will assist the center in evaluating how land use, forage quality and microclimate impact colony health to determine what makes for good and bad apiary sites.
Interested beekeepers can apply at http://ento.psu.edu/pollinators/beekeeper-registration.
This project is a collaboration between Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences’ Center for Pollinator Research and the College of Earth and Mineral Science’s Center for Environmental Informatics as well as Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster and the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association.