Tag Archives: sanitation

Confusing sanitation question

I don’t understand the sanitation question (maybe the 3rd or 4th)

RESPONSE: thank you for your comment. Apiary site selection means we can reduce drifting and help our bees stay in their proper hives by how we site our hives in the apiary. I am working on further explanation to help better explain – I think we do too little on basic sanitation with our bees and that makes mites stronger and more of an issue in our high colony losses.

2015 Survey Q & A – Ambiguous Questions

Q- First, thank you for conducting the survey. 2nd, please take a look at your questions. They can be ambiguous, maybe some clarification of the question might be helpful. For example, “what measures did you do for sanitation”… Well we didn’t intentionally disrupt the brood cycle, but the hive swarmed. So the brood cycle was disrupted, but we didn’t “do” that. Many of the questions were left up to interpretation.

Another example, During the peak of 2014 I had _ colonies. What was the peak of 2014? The peak production point of the hives? The point at which I had the most number of hives? (the answer could be different based on interpretation.

A-Thank you for taking time to complete a survey.  Also appreciate your comments on our question phrasing. We did NOT intentionally make them ambiguous but you are certainly correct that the wording sometimes is not as clear and concise as it needs to be to help us develop useful data.

We assume on sanitation that the bees know best – the bees swarmed –  so the question was intentionally designed to determine what you the beekeeper did – did you intentionally disrupt the brood cycle?

In my experience many beekeepers are pretty sloppy with basic sanitation – and I think our survey will demonstrate that. Should that perhaps be a focus of our educational effort ?— in point of fact I am part of a committee writing a fact sheet on bee bio-security (the “new” term for sanitation).
The peak question …..During the peak of 2014 I had _ colonies…. was perfectly clear to us but our placement of the the word peak in the sentence did not adequately convey what was our intended purpose with the question. As you point out did we mean peak production or peak of numbers??? Both are valid interpretations – we could have phrased it more simply – What was peak colony number in 2014? _____.
Next time!!!
Thank you for helping make our NEXT version more clearly worded with your comments on this version. That was very useful feedback. Appreciate it.