To build this envisioned international coalition — and invite you into it — we’re launching two online series to bring us all together: a quarterly Symposia Series and Honey Bee Watch Café. Both are free and open to the public.
Symposia Series
Each symposium will feature one issue integral to HBW — monitoring, data sharing, defining “wild” during the 2023 year — with invited guests presenting a brief overview of their individual projects, plus experiences with and thoughts on the respective topics. A panel discussion will ensue, followed by an audience Q&A (time permitting). To register, send an email with your name and which session(s) you'd like to attend to ambeessadors@gmail.com. Registrants will receive materials to review in advance.
Honey Bee Watch Café
During the interim months (dates to be confirmed), we'll host supplemental gatherings, called Honey Bee Watch Café, whereby you and other participants from around the world can present your experiences with free-living bees. If you'd like to share your free-living bee story, let us know (scroll to the bottom of the page).
The kickoff symposium tackles protocols, namely which data points we request citizen scientists and research partners collect when monitoring free-living nests and untreated colonies in apiaries, the two types of naturally surviving honey bee populations that we're studying.
Intending to become the world’s greatest repository of data on survivors, Honey Bee Watch strives to standardize protocols to a great degree, then share them far and wide in order to ensure parity of data globally. But how do you converge monitoring protocols from projects with different research goals, that have spanned varying time frames, that do or do not involve citizens, and with origins in countries as diverse as Serbia, Ireland, UK, US, and beyond?
Meet these four experts, who will share their projects, stories, opinions, and monitoring protocols:
As researchers potentially entering into a collaborative global study, what are our general concerns regarding data rights, sharing, and publishing? What role does open-source play? How have others addressed and resolved this topic? How should Honey Bee Watch handle this issue, with its unique situation of data providers comprised of both individuals (citizen scientists) and research partners from around the world?
As a Bee Guardian registering qualifying colonies into Honey Bee Watch, would you willingly share the bees' locations, observational details, your name, contact info, and more, when participating? Then, if your bees meet certain criteria, would you also allow a Bee Custodian come to validate and potentially sample them?
We'll discuss all of these questions and more with these panelists, who are involved in collecting data from free-living colonies in Luxembourg, Italy, and beyond, and who have dealt with data sharing issues before:
Honey bees are in a rare category within the animal kingdom, straddling wild and domesticated. In 2014, the IUCN assessed Apis mellifera in Europe, conferring a “data deficient” Red List status due to the difficulty of identifying and discerning wild populations. What defines “wild”? Why is this term so controversial? Does "wild" apply to the colony itself or entire self-sustaining populations too?
If scientists can accept a common definition, will we then be able to accurately reassess their Red List status as well as advance with coordinated conservation efforts internationally? During this talk, our guests will also talk about the usefulness of standardizing other terms and the benefits of widely distributing such a shared glossary.
During the months in between symposia — July, August, October, November — we'll host informal gatherings, whereby you can share your research projects and/or real-life experiences with free-living honey bees. These will be free-form "virtual handshake" sessions, a place to hear people's stories, learn about studies around the globe, glean new ideas, make connections, get inspired, and become part of our family of bee experts and enthusiasts.
If you'd like to sign up to give a 5-10–minute talk to your peers, write an email of introduction — who you are, what your story is — to Steve Rogenstein at ambeessadors@gmail.com. We'll review applications and pick up to five talks per event.
Project Director: Steve Rogenstein at The Ambeessadors
Science Director: Arrigo Moro at University of Galway
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