Agricultural Education
We Need Some Young Beekeepers!
The Pollination Industry is responsible for billions in agricultural production, yet you will find little information in official publications about a career in this field. You will look in vain in career guidance sources for information about pollination service as a career. Even in agricultural statistics, you can only find information about honey production, not pollination, which is more important.
General Agriculture (Let these folks know
how much we need to beef up pollination training)
4H Council
An example of a 4H project in
Ohio
The Boy Scouts of America (have recently
restored the Beekeeping Merit Badge)
Future Farmers of America
National Association of Agricultural Educators
Kid's Sites and Resources for Teachers
Of Bees, Beekeepers and Food... My
wife Janice's Page
Pollinators and Flowers California
Native Plant Society
Fruit Development
How we get the fruit we eat, Grades 1-4
Lesson Plans on Bees and
Pollination K-12 Arizona
Kids
and Bees Identification and surveys of Virginia Bumblebees
Young Entomologists' Society
Farm to Supermarket to
Dinner Table... Dr. Steve Buchmann AZ
Apiculture & Pollination at Universities
Only a few US and Canadian schools offer good apiculture programs, and even
fewer have courses in pollination management that bridge the horticulture department and
the entomology department. We are working to provide a list of schools where an
aspiring student can obtain at least a beekeeping education, hopefully with some
pollination background as well. The desired school should be generally strong in
agriculture, which leads one first to the Land Grant Schools. (-Another
list of agricultural schools)
Generally apiculture is subsumed under entomology, with only one or two
teachers. The quality of the program is highly dependent upon the quality of the teachers.
Some of the best teachers, such as Dr. Hoopengarner at Michigan and Dr. Morse at New York
have recently retired, and it remains to be seen what will become of their programs.
Pollination is usually treated separately and quite differently in the
Entomology and Horticulture Departments, which don't talk to each other as much as they
should. And the main emphasis of both areas is on how to kill insects, not enhance them.
The position of apiculturist must be a very lonely position in most entomology
departments. Every now and then you see the apiculture guy succumb to the prevailing
mindset, for example, when he or she publishes a guide on how to kill carpenter bees,
which are valuable pollinators.
Leading Pollination Specialists, Educators
and Researchers For such a small field, grad students
might better pick their mentors than universities....
Ross Koning's comments on
choosing your grad school/mentor
An
Ag School List by About.com
University of California,
Davis
University
of Michigan
AgAlternatives at Penn State:
Beginner guide to beekeeping has a section on pollination, and a budget that
includes doing pollination (Check Penn State for other pollination resources)
University of Florida Apiculture
At
the University of Nebraska
In
Maylasia
The
U.S. Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training in beekeeping
Australasian Pollination Ecologists
Society
University Horticulture Programs
Many of the hort people I've known, graduated with a general idea that bees
are good, and that is the extent of their pollination training. If you know of a school
that has a good program in pollination management, please let us know.