The COLOSS BEEBOOK, a Manual of Standard Methods for Honey Bee Research

Abstract

The Vision The BEEBOOK project arose from discussions at early COLOSS (Prevention of Honey Bee COlony LOSSes) meetings. The vision was, and still is, to develop a definitive inventory of standard techniques and methods in honey bee research to ensure that studies performed by different laborato-ries around the world would be directly comparable. The manual, titled the COLOSS BEEBOOK , was inspired by publications with similar purposes for Drosophila fruit fly research (Williams et al., 2012). The previous lack of standards had made, for example, establishing whether honey bee colony losses had indeed increased, or were greater in some countries than in others, exceptionally difficult. The BEEBOOK is not meant to standardize the research itself, but focusses solely on the methods for which standardization is useful to enable reproducibility as a corner-stone of science. The BEEBOOK is a tool for all who want to conduct research on honey bees. It has been written in such a way that those new to honey bee research can use it to begin studies in fields with which they may not be familiar. the select and a user-friendly The initial divided into