If you have 4 hives at your office, your company can participate in the Sentinel Apiary Program – the largest honey bee disease monitoring program in the world. The goal of the Sentinel Apiary program is to become an early warning system to alert beekeepers of potential problems due to increases in Varroa/Nosema (or changes in hive weight with the addition of a hive scale).
Sentinel data contributes to exciting research including:
- Investigation of inter-apiary Varroa transmission (Varroa “bomb”)
- Correlation of internal physical symptoms to mortality using historical Sentinel samples
- Collaboration with NASA-DEVELOP to investigate landscape effects on Sentinel colony health using NASA-Earth satellite imagery