Suggestions for research

[Wilco]

Hi all,

I work part time at a University and as part of that some students are inflicted and afflicted with me as a research project supervisor. It's at the point in the year when I have to come up with titles and rough outlines for research projects which are randomly allocated to students; I will have two student projects and would like to do one on something bee related.

Does anyone have any ideas or questions which I can unleash a (hopefully enthusiastic) student upon, subject to the below fussiness?

• Ideas would need to be relatively simple as they only have a pathetic 2k words per project and a couple of months to do it in alongside other studies.
• As this involves a university, health and safety likely means I'll need to do most data collection myself if it involves handling bees.
• There may be a budget of up to £300 for the project.
• I would like something which could actually be useful/meaningful to beekeeping as, in my opinion, a lot of research is done because someone needs to do a project for x/y/z reason rather than for purposes which actually benefit the broader population.
• I also prefer the idea of collecting and analysing actual data rather than opinions...

I've got a couple of weeks to come up with the outline so if anyone has any good suggestions, please post them below. TIA!

 

[Repwoc]

How about how to purify Apibioxal so it doesn't gum up my vaporiser?

 

[pargyle]

How about how to purify Apibioxal so it doesn't gum up my vaporiser?

That's easy ... I can sell you some purified Apibioxal that doesn't gum up your vapoouriser ... £5.00 / 100gm including postage ... a bargain.

 

[Apiarisnt]

Hi all,

I work part time at a University and as part of that some students are inflicted and afflicted with me as a research project supervisor. It's at the point in the year when I have to come up with titles and rough outlines for research projects which are randomly allocated to students; I will have two student projects and would like to do one on something bee related.

Does anyone have any ideas or questions which I can unleash a (hopefully enthusiastic) student upon, subject to the below fussiness?

• Ideas would need to be relatively simple as they only have a pathetic 2k words per project and a couple of months to do it in alongside other studies.
• As this involves a university, health and safety likely means I'll need to do most data collection myself if it involves handling bees.
• There may be a budget of up to £300 for the project.
• I would like something which could actually be useful/meaningful to beekeeping as, in my opinion, a lot of research is done because someone needs to do a project for x/y/z reason rather than for purposes which actually benefit the broader population.
• I also prefer the idea of collecting and analysing actual data rather than opinions...

I've got a couple of weeks to come up with the outline so if anyone has any good suggestions, please post them below. TIA!

2k words would be about right for a decent project defintion...but for a project?

Plenty of ideas, but;

• What disciplines (for want of a better word) are they likely to be from; and
• What time of the year will the two months be?

 

[Wilco]

2k words would be about right for a decent project defintion...but for a project?

Plenty of ideas, but;

• What disciplines (for want of a better word) are they likely to be from; They are vet students. Think simple in terms of interventions to investigate- stats are not their (or most vets') strong point so even getting into ANOVA territory tends to cause palpitations.
• What time of the year will the two months be? More than two months- usually between Feb and May but obviously they need time to write up and I can potentially do data collection all year.

I know.... staff basically have to summarise a project in a couple of sentences for this and the number of staff and students grumbling about the low word count is not insignificant. It's meant to be representative of the length of a published paper in the journal the students are supposed to format etc. in the style of. Think they very deliberately call it a research project rather than a dissertation.

Responses to your questions are within the quote section above.

 

[E&MBees]

How about how keeping bees can help to reconnect someone living with Mental Health challenges with nature. Provides a sense of purpose, allows people to reconnect with others too. Could be through a supported placement.

There is quite a lot on green prescribing and it’s associated benefits.

 

[Patrick1]

Hi all,

I work part time at a University and as part of that some students are inflicted and afflicted with me as a research project supervisor. It's at the point in the year when I have to come up with titles and rough outlines for research projects which are randomly allocated to students; I will have two student projects and would like to do one on something bee related.

Does anyone have any ideas or questions which I can unleash a (hopefully enthusiastic) student upon, subject to the below fussiness?

• Ideas would need to be relatively simple as they only have a pathetic 2k words per project and a couple of months to do it in alongside other studies.
• As this involves a university, health and safety likely means I'll need to do most data collection myself if it involves handling bees.
• There may be a budget of up to £300 for the project.
• I would like something which could actually be useful/meaningful to beekeeping as, in my opinion, a lot of research is done because someone needs to do a project for x/y/z reason rather than for purposes which actually benefit the broader population.
• I also prefer the idea of collecting and analysing actual data rather than opinions...

I've got a couple of weeks to come up with the outline so if anyone has any good suggestions, please post them below. TIA!

I designed one some years ago for Dover District Beekeepers, we inspected the hives noted the health and status of queens etc. we marked 200 drones in each of three hives different colours each hive, then inspected them over several weeks, in reality data from a few hours was useful. Things to note are drone movement between hives, rapid and in numbers, potential spread of EFB,AFB and varroa. It was a good reality check for a lot of beekeepers.

 

[Ian123]

How about current apivar effectiveness maybe a comparison to Apistan and or oxalic strips as well. Your small budget will stretch to a few packs plus alcohol wash kit and maybe a gas vap to check residual mite levels. 6 week treatment plus time to check mite levels works with the couple of months time frame. Am sure you could find an outlet like bee craft for subsequent paper. Ian

 

[Norton Caff]

Comparison of the seasonal build up and decline of colonies in different habitats (city, market own, countryside) with a study of available forage.
Which is the better environment, are stories of city bees being overstocked true or false(!)
Is this for just the one year?

 

[Finman]

Varroa treatment researches are not easy. You must consider many things. And propably issues are allready known.

Like Professor Ratlesniek made his researches wrong. He calculated dead mites even if only half of mites were dead. Then he was in a hurry to doom dribbling without wider knowledge. What were his aims, no one knows.

He was in a hurry to do something....

 

[Erichalfbee]

Varroa treatment researches are not easy. You must consider many thinks. And propably issues are allready known.

Like Professor Ratlesniek made his researches wrong. He calculated dead mites even if only half of mites were dead. Then he was in a hurry to doom dribbling without wider knowledge. What were his aims, no one knows.

He was in a hurry to do something....

Finny you are a gem.
That's made my evening .......once I clear the tea off the computer

 

[Apiarisnt]

I know.... staff basically have to summarise a project in a couple of sentences for this and the number of staff and students grumbling about the low word count is not insignificant. It's meant to be representative of the length of a published paper in the journal the students are supposed to format etc. in the style of. Think they very deliberately call it a research project rather than a dissertation.

Responses to your questions are within the quote section above.

Timing might be an issue. Not a lot of experimental stuff you could do in Feb to May and still have time to write it up. Something about pre season preparations perhaps.

 

[Sutty]

If you are able to recruit a few friendly beekeepers, how about rate of uptake of autumn feed syrup with and without additional electrolytes? Easy to blind, and "free syrup" (if budget allows) may help persuade a few. Bees seem to prefer "dirty" water, so maybe syrup too. Overwintering success could be a secondary endpoint.

 

[Wilco]

How about how keeping bees can help to reconnect someone living with Mental Health challenges with nature. Provides a sense of purpose, allows people to reconnect with others too. Could be through a supported placement.

There is quite a lot on green prescribing and it’s associated benefits.

Nice but doubt it's possible in the timeframe and budget- would need to involve a number of people to get a proper assessment and even then most outcomes are likely to be subjective rather than objective unless done on a very large scale over many years. Also will be a nightmare to get ethical approval for.

I designed one some years ago for Dover District Beekeepers, we inspected the hives noted the health and status of queens etc. we marked 200 drones in each of three hives different colours each hive, then inspected them over several weeks, in reality data from a few hours was useful. Things to note are drone movement between hives, rapid and in numbers, potential spread of EFB,AFB and varroa. It was a good reality check for a lot of beekeepers.

Very cool idea and fits with being simple and having a meaningful plus measurable finding although I'd prefer to try and do something which hasn't been done before. Any more ideas?

How about current apivar effectiveness maybe a comparison to Apistan and or oxalic strips as well. Your small budget will stretch to a few packs plus alcohol wash kit and maybe a gas vap to check residual mite levels. 6 week treatment plus time to check mite levels works with the couple of months time frame. Am sure you could find an outlet like bee craft for subsequent paper. Ian

If you are able to recruit a few friendly beekeepers, how about rate of uptake of autumn feed syrup with and without additional electrolytes? Easy to blind, and "free syrup" (if budget allows) may help persuade a few. Bees seem to prefer "dirty" water, so maybe syrup too. Overwintering success could be a secondary endpoint.

@Ian123 @Sutty Liking the thinking here but I'm not going to have enough colonies to do a semi-rigorous study on this as involving multiple beekeepers would introduce a lot of other variables which could affect the outcome and confound any findings. Uptake of syrup will potentially vary a lot depending on genetics, stores, forage availability/weather and size of colony so not sure how to factor all these in.

Comparison of the seasonal build up and decline of colonies in different habitats (city, market own, countryside) with a study of available forage.
Which is the better environment, are stories of city bees being overstocked true or false(!)
Is this for just the one year?

Again think we'll struggle with this one based on timescale and funding although could be done by survey based on location, yields and finding out certain facts about how the bees are kept but still risky as room for lots of confounding factors.

Timing might be an issue. Not a lot of experimental stuff you could do in Feb to May and still have time to write it up. Something about pre season preparations perhaps.

Yes, it's a bit tricky to manage (especially when factoring in variables associated with different beekeeping styles, regional climate differences and vagaries of weather between years unless I can do something about overwintering with my own colonies as a prelim study.

Varroa treatment researches are not easy. You must consider many things. And propably issues are allready known.

Like Professor Ratlesniek made his researches wrong. He calculated dead mites even if only half of mites were dead. Then he was in a hurry to doom dribbling without wider knowledge. What were his aims, no one knows.

He was in a hurry to do something....

Exactly my thinking! The best I can think of is testing overwintering survival of a series of mini mating nucs in a controlled environment with standardised treatments, feeding and environments (e.g. maybe keeping in a fridge with lighting on a timer but allowing voiding flights on appropriate weather days). Partly because I want to see if I can do it and from what I've read here others have done it with extensions so I'm wondering if it's possible without... Doing so might mean we can increase supply of mated UK queens in the early season (and theoretically the rest of the bees in the nuc can be merged with a full colony to help boost numbers if there's a good flow early season). I know it's (a bit) harebrained and findings may not be more broadly applicable as would be based on a single site and limited genetics... As you say better not to do anything than rush to 'do something'.

 

[Markthebuilder]

An comparative study of of how much honey / chemicals are in supermarket honey vs sugar water etc etc compared to a similar number of samples from random beeks. At the price people sell you should be able to get plenty of samples

A random study of how much honey a hive genuinely produces ie contact a hundred beeks and establish how many hives / how many suppers how many L/ lb honey they extract. In any given year. compare the results to what beaks report on here. Or is regurgitated in books.
It might produce a realistic rather than regurgitated figures given in books or the oft quoted my best hive in 19.0.dot produced xxx who knows if selected beeks have kept proper hive records you may be able to demonstrate the effect of honey production on climate change.

Not suggesting people exaggerate or under declare but I know lots of bricklayers ,quantity surveyors and customers , that think a bricky lays 1000 bricks a day …but In 40 years I have only Seen 1 do it.

Ask groups of beaks control questions and see how many different answers you really get. This could be compared with asking Controle questions of say train spotters , migrants seeking asylum & politicians to determine if there are any social or economic variances.

Undertake a study of plants sold by garden centres as good for bees and see if a honey bee ever visits any of them.

I genuinely think your idea is great and hope you find the right question and a student to take it forward.

 

[Apiarist]

I have two ideas.

1. Measuring the Internal Volume Areas of the T2 Tracheas of A. m. mellifera - and possibly Buckfasts as well, AND include Drones: Research was conducted in (from memory) 2004 on south Mediterranean / Balkan bees (four sub-species), it found a direct correlation between Acarapis woodi mite infestation of the T2 Trachea and the internal volume area, basically larger = more mites. Bailey established decades ago that a colony needs to have a 30%+ population infestation for Acarine (CBPV) symptoms to be observable, at 50%+ infestation survival of the hive would became an issue, especially in Winter. It has been suspected that the Drones helped spread the old Isle of Wight Disease, and that A. m. mellifera are more susceptible to Acarine (a combination of Acarapis woodi and CBPV) than other bees. This research could answer these questions. You could go one step further and obtain A. m. mellifera from different regions in Europe that we know are genetically distinct from each other, such as northern and southern France, Poland and south Russia. I also suspect that the Buckfast bee may not be as resistant to Acarine as it once was due to Varroa treatments which kill Acarapis woodi, meaning resistance (small internal volume areas) aren't being breed for.

2. Measure the mating heights of Queens and Drones of A. m. mellifera, and maybe other sub-species such as A. m. carnica and Buckfast, under British conditions. This is more technical and microscopic devices would need to be attached to the bees in question. Research has been conducted on the continent for A. m. carnica and A. m. ligustica that shows they mate at different heights. The ramifications of this for beekeepers trying to rear their own queens is potentially very significant; a bit difficult to explain (and it is conjecture), but basically if a beekeeper buys a A. m. ligustica queen and rears a virgin from her, the virgin will enter into the DCA at a different height than the local Drones but at the same height as her own, very few brothers, the first Drone that mates with the queen contributes about 30% of the total spermatoza that the queens obtains on that mating flight... queens that mate with their brothers cause the workers in a mating nuc or colony to become aggressive, until she's replaced).

 

[fizzle]

Bee adaptation - how the honey bee has learned to live along side the human populations.

 

[Patrick1]

Or, how honeybees have managed to survive our best efforts ☹

 

[Patrick1]

Hi all,

I work part time at a University and as part of that some students are inflicted and afflicted with me as a research project supervisor. It's at the point in the year when I have to come up with titles and rough outlines for research projects which are randomly allocated to students; I will have two student projects and would like to do one on something bee related.

Does anyone have any ideas or questions which I can unleash a (hopefully enthusiastic) student upon, subject to the below fussiness?

• Ideas would need to be relatively simple as they only have a pathetic 2k words per project and a couple of months to do it in alongside other studies.
• As this involves a university, health and safety likely means I'll need to do most data collection myself if it involves handling bees.
• There may be a budget of up to £300 for the project.
• I would like something which could actually be useful/meaningful to beekeeping as, in my opinion, a lot of research is done because someone needs to do a project for x/y/z reason rather than for purposes which actually benefit the broader population.
• I also prefer the idea of collecting and analysing actual data rather than opinions...

I've got a couple of weeks to come up with the outline so if anyone has any good suggestions, please post them below. TIA!

If you find a project that requires equipment or materials that are available from my company I would be happy to help, the proviso is the results are freely available to others, hopefully to stimulate more of the same type of projects, lost of small projects may just be the answer to a lot of simple problems confronting beekeepers, help establish a different mindset in some areas

 

[Karol]

If you find a project that requires equipment or materials that are available from my company I would be happy to help, the proviso is the results are freely available to others, hopefully to stimulate more of the same type of projects, lost of small projects may just be the answer to a lot of simple problems confronting beekeepers, help establish a different mindset in some areas

You will probably find that any intellectual property arising from this project which has a scintilla of commercial value becomes the exclusive property of the university. Makes me seethe the way that universities have ceased to be benevolent learning institutions and have become profiteering business corporations whose currency is information which they sell at extortionate rates the costs of which is mortgaged onto the future of our young people. 2000 word project with possibly a £300 budget that is costing the student circa £4000 to fund!