by
Dr. Tom Sanford
Extension Apiculturist
University of FloridaIn this article:
Introduction
Beekeeping Extension in the United States of
America:
Evolution of Extension Apicultural Information
Delivery in Florida:
Electronic Delivery of the APIS Newsletter
Stand-Alone Digital Resources:
Other Digital Resources:
Internet Resources:
How To Get Access to the Internet:
Future Information Delivery:
References:
Although often described as simply the "information revolution," the digital aspect potentially means much more. It is nothing short of redefining much of what we know and how we know it. “In the time of one and zero we have begun to appreciate the power of information, since virtually everything can be converted into streams of data--philosophy, chromosomes, wealth, this text, the sound of my voice. The process of conversion erases space and time; data is essentially dimensonless. Thus going digital implies messing seriously with the Euclidean, Newtonian world of common experience. We tend to look away from this fact because it’s easier to look away than to consider the implications of the powerful tools we are designing.” (Stone, 1995).
Like everyone else, the beekeeper is also being affected by the digital information revolution. The purpose of this article is to examine the history of this phenomenon and provide some perspective on what it potentially means to the future of Cooperative Extension activities as they relate to beekeeping.
The Cooperative Extension Service consists of tiers of information delivery. Specialists at the college or university level discover and publish information about agricultural research. It is then disseminated to local extension offices. There is an extension office is every county in Florida and the vast majority of counties in the United States. The extension office, then finally delivers the information to local residents. The advantage of the system is its direct ties to the university where the knowledge is generated. The effectiveness of this organization is without question. It has become a model adopted by many other countries throughout the world.
As part of Cooperative Extension, apiculture is one of many specialties found at the University level in the United States. Because beekeeping is a minor agricultural activity, however, not all states have a specialist dedicated to this area. And some might be employed only on a partial basis, also having responsibility in other areas like household or turf insects. At any one time, depending on how it is calculated, there may be the equivalent of 8 to 15 full-time extension positions (FTEs) of this nature in the United States. Florida traditionally has had a full-time extension apiculturist since the 1950s. The author currently holds that position at the University of Florida. Because there are so few specialists in this area, any extension beekeeping specialist must be prepared to serve the wider apicultural community outside the state and even the nation.
The extension program also features several pamphlets on bee management, nectar-producing plants, honey bee diseases and pests and economic analyses. It has produced two videotape productions: A Glimpse of Florida Beekeeping and Varroa Mite Detection and single-issue fact sheets are published on occasion. Finally, the extension apiculturist participates in national, state and local beekeepers meetings and is routinely invited to present the unique perspective provided by Florida beekeeping in international venues.
Traditionally, extension information has been either delivered orally on site or published on paper. As travel costs have increased, face-to-face communications, arguably the best received and digested by clientele, has fallen off in favor of print-based materials. Most of the publications listed above for the Florida program have been made available in print (some are no longer being published on paper) and have been distributed free to the public.
Although designed to be distributive in nature, the Cooperative Extension model in Florida operates on several levels. Information is firstly provided to county offices for further publication as they see fit. However, depending on the work load, information may also come directly from the specialist at the university. This has been the case with the APIS newsletter which is published by the extension apiculturist and mailed directly to extension offices, as well as clientele. Historically, other resources have been distributed both by county offices and the university.
Because it is the only monthly beekeeping newsletter published regularly in the United States, there are continual requests for APIS from across the nation and around the world. It was impossible in the past to respond positively to all of these because of printing and mailing costs. It would have been unfair to Florida citizens to have to pay this bill on their own. One possibility would have been to charge a fee for the newsletter, something that was taken seriously under consideration for a number of years until the digital revolution made electronic delivery a reality.
It was not long after the first electronic issue was disseminated by BITNET that the rapidly developing Internet became the delivery method of choice. The Internet has been described as the world’s largest machine--tens of thousands of computers networked together communicating text, graphics and sound. This "network of networks" is used routinely for electronic mail, electronic file transfer (FTP), Gopher (menu- based text information) and World Wide Web (a wedding of the above technologies plus graphics, sound and video)
Originally, the author developed an extensive electronic address list to deliver the APIS newsletter strictly as text This became unwieldy, however, and prompted development of a batch mail facility on the University of Florida College of Agriculture mainframe computer. Principally due to these developments, the author was able to continue to publish the newsletter, even while on sabbatical leave in Italy (1989), or away in 1992 as a Volunteer in Overseas Cooperative Assistance (VOCA) in Egypt.
Later, a huge amount of Cooperative Extension information, including the APIS newsletter, was mounted on the College of Agriculture mainframe, now a minicomputer. Thus, two major kinds of electronic outlets for the newsletter were possible. One was active; each new issue was mailed to a list kept by the author. The other was passive, back issues were available to College of Agriculture personnel with mainframe accounts.
At the same time, the Florida Agricultural Information Retrieval System (FAIRS) was developing. A section on apicultural information, originally placed in the "Ag Agents Handbook," was, was one of the first parts of the FAIRS database to be implemented. Most of that information is still available on the FAIRS for-sale CD-ROM, and is being implemented on the World Wide Web.
When Gopher, a text-based, menu-driven technology, was developed at the University of Minnesota, APIS began to be archived on various Gopher servers around the nation and world. Finally, the University of Florida College of Agriculture online database, which held all electronic back issues became an accessible gopher node (gop her://ifas.ufl.edu/11gopher_root3%3a%5bdatabase%5d). At the present time, all electronic issues are found at that site and are key-word searchable for those with accounts on that machine.
All these developments now mean that the newsletter is available worldwide in a number of electronic formats. Anyone with Internet access can also get APIS electronically as it is published. For a subscription, enter the following: subscribe Apis-L First Name Last Name as the first line in the body of a message to listserv@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu.
APIS was officially recognized as a pioneering electronic publication in a book sent to the U.S. Congress as a lobbying document to support funding the National Information Infrastructure, or NII (Stone-Martin and Breeden, 1994). Many of the stories in this document reveal how the Cooperative Extension Service is using the Internet to carry out its mission. The author has also published his personal experiences in electronic communications in a professional journal (Sanford, 1993).
The latest event in the electronic evolution of the APIS newsletter is its presence on the World Wide Web. The Web is accessed through Internet with a “browser” software [e.g. Netscape® , Mosaic®, Microsoft Explorer®] that can read hypertext markup language (HTML). The APIS address is:
http://www.ifas.ufl.edu/~mts/apishtm/apis.htm.
This site was awarded three stars from Magellan, the McKinley Comprehensive Internet Directory, for its depth and organization. The directory lists over 1.5 million Web sites and regularly publishes reviews about those it considers superior in design and content.
The four most recent years’ issues of APIS have been marked up in the Web’s HTML language. Other back issues are also available in ASCII text format from the site. All can be retrieved worldwide 24 hours a day. At this time, any beekeeper can access the newsletter through large, commercial online databases (Compuserve®, America Online®, Prodigy®) or other Internet providers.
The ability to skip within and between documents provided by HTML has added several dimensions to the APIS newsletter. Not only is an abbreviated master index available in straight ASCII text for all back issues, but now yearly indices “point” to individual numbers. Each issue also contains a table of contents. Thus, sections of newsletters are now instantly reachable either from an index or within other documents.
Graphics have also been added. The newsletter logo originally was featured on the beginning screen or “home page.” The home page is a metaphor for a “virtual” place or location (site) that represents some entity (i.e. person, business, publication) on the Web. Each page has a unique address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that begins with HTTP://, denoting it is accessible using HyperText Transfer Protocol. Recently the APIS home page and the 1989 through 1996 index pages have been enhanced with coordinated background and text colors per newest versions of the Netscape® 3.0 web browser . For those not using this software, there is the option to choose a more plain-vanilla version.
Finally, a good many other world wide web beekeeping- related sites are accessible from the APIS home page. These resources will be explored in some detail later.
Through the efforts of the American Association of Professional Apiculturists (AAPA), a beekeeping database is available. Developed using the format of the Florida Agricultural Information Retrieval System (FAIRS), it contains a large number of screens of information on many aspects of beekeeping. The database runs under the DOS operating system and makes extensive use of graphics. It requires at least an 80268 computer with 1.7 MB of available disk storage space. It supports use of a mouse and costs U.S. 50 dollars. For the most recent information, contact Dr. Marion Ellis, 202 Plant Industry Building, P.O. Box 830816, Lincoln, NE 68583-0816, (http://ianrwww.unl.edu/ianr/entomol/beekpg/aapapubs.htm). The AAPA also makes available a computerized spreadsheet model for the economic analysis of beekeeping operations. This is entitled Bee Economics. Based in part on an original product developed at the University of Florida (Sanford, 1986), this software has been updated by L.S. Willett and N.W. Calderone at Cornell University. Written using Microsoft Excel® 5.0 and available in both Windows® and Macintosh® Formats, it requires 1.4 MB of disk space and at least 4 MB of RAM. For latest information, see the AAPA site (http://ianrwww.unl.edu/ianr/entomol/beekpg/aapapubs.htm).< p> > Use of a remote bulletin board systems (RBBS) was also pioneered by the Florida extension apiculturist (Sanford, 1988). However, this concept was abandoned in favor of disseminating information by electronic mail and the Internet. One beekeeper-run computer bulletin board continues to operate in California, however. The Systems Operator (SYSOP) is Mr. Andy Nachbaur, 115 Paradise Lane, Los Banos, CA 93635, dataline number 209/826-8107. A number of other beekeeping-oriented bulletin boards are currently being accessed in Europe through the beenet site: http://.
PC-Beepop, a digital computer population model for honey bee colonies will soon be available in an updated version. It is developed by Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk and his group at the University of Montana and runs on DOS Computers. For details on its availability, see the following: (http://grizzly.umt .edu/biology/bees/). It is a projected to be available by file transfer protocol (FTP) from that site.
One formal Internet discussion list (Bee-L) has relevance to beekeepers. Many topics about the practicalities of bee management are described and debated there. For a subscription, enter the following: subscribe Bee-l First Name Last Name as the first line in the body of a message to listserv@cnsibm.albany .edu.
The Usenet group is sci.agriculture.beekeeping and can be accessed through any newsgroup service with access to the Internet. A short review of these resources has also been published (Scott, 1996).
The most exciting development on the Internet is the amount of material being mounted on the World Wide Web. The APIS site lists links to many of these, including the FAIRS site noted above.
Internet resources currently run a wide range from equipment manufacturers (Thorne's in Great Britain http://www.thorne.co.uk/), publications (Bee Culture magazine is now found at http://www.airoot.com ), organizations (British Bee Breeders Association [ http://www.millhouse.co.uk/bibba ] and International Bee Research Association [ http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/ibra/index.html]) to individual sites dedicated to mead making [ http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rdp/gfc/mead/mead.html ] and using apitherapy [ http://www.shore.net/~spectrum/apitherapy.html ]. There are even sites dedicated to honey bee types (Kangaroo Island bees [ http://www.eastend.com.au/~goble ] and Africanized bees [ http://128.194.30.1/agcom/news/hc/ahb/ahbhome.htm ] have their own home pages!). Things are changing so rapidly in this area it is impossible to list all possibly relevant sites here. For a more complete and updated listing see the links page associated with the APIS home page. Because of the dynamics of this technology, the best way to begin a search for any special information is through one of the Web's many search engines like AltaVista [http://www.altavista.digital.com] or Yahoo [http://www.yahoo.com].
For the beekeeper, this revolution means access to a wider variety of information about the art and science of apiculture than ever before. There is a “dark side,” however, to this technology The power that once rested in relatively few hands, like the Cooperative Extension Service, considered for the most part to be an “objective” source and producing information based on scientific evidence, is now open to anyone with a computer and modem. As a consequence, the information user must take more pains to ensure the reliability of the increasingly less expensive digital data being received. This will be the biggest challenge to face in the future as the digital information age matures.
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Sanford, M.T. 1988. The Bee Board--An RBBS Application, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computers in Agricultural Extension Programs, IFAS, University of Florida, February. pp. 516-521.
Sanford, M.T. 1986b. Profitability Model for a Mid-Sized Beekeeping Operation. Circular 692, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, IFAS Software offering #043, 26 pp.
Sanford, M.T. 1993. Communicating in the 'Global Village.' American Entomologist 39:1 pp. 8-9.
Sanford, M.T., T.R. Fasulo and J.C. Medley. 1993. Electronic Delivery of Apicultural Information, BeeScience, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 10-15.
Sanford, M.T. 1996. Electronic Newsletter Delivery: From Email to World Wide Web. Proc. Sixth International Conference on Computers in Agriculture, American Society of Agricultural Engineers, Cancun, MX, pp. 867-871.
Stone-Martin, M. and L. Breeden, eds. 1994. 51 Reasons: How We Use the Internet and What it Says About the Information Superhighway Farnet, Inc., Lexington, MA.
Stone, A. R. 1995 Memories of Oneness: Or, The Machine Age Arrived And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, National Key Centre for Design at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, URL: http://www.cfd.rmit.edu.au/ , 1995.
Scott, G. 1996. A Beeline Through Cyberspace Pt. 2. BEE BIZ; Vol. 1, No. 2 (February), pp. 18-19.
© 1996, M.T. Sanford, "All Rights Reserved"