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Knowledge Management & Analysis Award - BeeBase
Knowledge Management Team - Winner of the Knowledge Management and Analysis Award, sponsored by Microsoft
Bee health is now a major issue concerning government and stakeholders and has risen significantly in public awareness over the last year. A major challenge has been identifying beekeepers, who are currently under no legal obligation to register, to allow a meaningful programme of inspections to be undertaken.
BeeBase, part of the National Bee Unit (NBU) website, is the online database run by the NBU at Defra’s Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera). BeeBase is a very powerful IT resource which stores information relating to all apiary inspections carried out by the unit’s inspectors as well as the results of research and statutory samples submitted by inspectors and beekeepers.
Launched as a web-based application by knowledge-management scientists at Fera, BeeBase also allows beekeepers to access their own apiary information, diagnostic histories and inspection details securely over the internet. The statutory apiary programme is risk-based and inspectors are able to target their visits according to the risk of disease transmission or reoccurrence, as well as an apiary’s proximity to potential exotic pest risk points such as airports, container freight depots and sea ports.
Furthermore, once an apiary has been identified as having a problem, other apiaries and beekeepers within a 10 km radius can be quickly identified and alerted either by the inspector or by an automated mailshot.
More than 5,900 new beekeepers have been registered on BeeBase in the last three years. The increasing number of registrations will lead to an increased awareness among beekeepers regarding bee health, provide more opportunities for provision of training, leading more effective providing more opportunities for training disease-monitoring, leading to more effective disease monitoring and control and thereby an improvement in the health of the national honeybee population as a whole.
Last updated 243 days ago by Kevin Sorkin