I am the shadowy guy, lower left.

On Thursday at the Montreal Apimondia, I gave a presentation about the average distance bees fly while foraging. The full title was Foraging distances of commercially-deployed bees: a meta-analysis.  When I find some time, I’ll do a voice-over and create a version of the talk that you can watch. The bottom line is that there is really no single, simple answer – foraging distance is highly landscape-dependent. This is important. Whether you are a farmer trying to figure out where to place rental bees for efficient, economical pollination or a land manager trying to reduce the effects of high-density non-native bees, you need to know where the bees will be flying. The presentation included foraging distances, which I’ll talk about in another post, another day.

During Apimondia, there were 269 oral presentations. I found it hard to attend all the talks I wanted to because so much was happening at the conference. On Tuesday, however, I moderated a session on “Diversifying income sources for beekeepers“, so I was forced to stay in the hall, introduce speakers, field questions from the audience, and (crucially) yank microphones from speakers’ hands when their time was up. Since I had to sit there anyway, I decided to use my time wisely and listen to the speakers. I’m glad that I did. I learned a lot.

I can’t do fair summaries of anyone’s talks, so I’m not going to try. Here, however, is a list of the titles of some of the talks which I attended. I’m listing them so you can see some of the variety of subjects covered.

Beekeeping, women and sustainable development

Approaches to targeting the poorest people through beekeeping in
Amhara, Ethiopia

Fiji’s Beekeeping Mentor Program

Royal jelly has beneficial effects on lipid profile, satiety, inflammation
and antioxidant capacity in asymptomatic overweight adults

Colombian propolis with biological potential: antitumor and
immunomodulatory action, in vitro assay in osteosarcoma cells

The Growth of a Prairie Operation: 35 Years of Growth and Taking
Advantage of New Opportunities

Meeting the Ontario Market: Honey Packing and Queen Production

Pollination Markets and Bee Forage

Chinese Version of “Fable of The Bees”

Dynamics of queen demand and supply in CanadaModeling the economic impact of Varroa destructor on Australian beekeepers

Building on a Commercially Viable CIDA/Kenya Beekeeping Collaborative Program to a Transformative, Self-sustaining Enterprise

The crisis of Ukranian beekeeping of 2018 and ways to go out from it

Diversifying Income Sources for Small Farmers through Beekeeping with Indigenous Bees in India

Genetic selection of the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) in a northern climate

The Saskatraz Breeding and Selection Program 2019

Quality and Performance of Imported and Domestic Queens

Honeybee mating and its impact on queen performance and health

Drone factors influencing queen reproduction and health

Building your Brand: The Importance of Integrity

Conservation and design of forage habitat for bees, the challenge of “partial habitats”

Colony health in intensified agricultural landscapes: monitoring the impact of forage availability on honey bee hives in heavily cultivated areas

The potential of urban agriculture to create landscapes of abundance for native and honey bees

It looks like a long list. I guess it is. This surprises me because I didn’t realize how many talks I actually attended until I listed them. My own talk was on Thursday afternoon. I couldn’t stay around after it. I ended my talk at 2 and was on my way to the Montreal airport at 3. On the flight back to Calgary, I flipped through the lists of talks printed in the Apimondia guide book and realized that I missed over 200 good ones during my four days at the conference. Maybe next time, in Russia, I’ll see more.