Information Technology; The A to Web of Beekeeping
September 1996
There was a time when I considered beekeeping a refuge from the pace, technology and general noise of life. Many of us I’m sure still look for the solitude and peace that can be found in a quiet country apiary and dream of harmonious work with a wild creature. Perhaps. Even so the rest of the world intrudes, the EC labelling, the foreign pests, whatever; and the eclectic nature of those little she-devils seems to require a constant dialogue with pals and advisors and a thorough knowledge of the literature. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be, because surely one of the attractions of beekeeping is the connection you make with a greater whole, with nature, with seasons, with farming and so on. So not only could I not escape I forgot I wanted to and, especially as a beginner, began to value conversations swapping information, sources, or speculation, almost as much as the work outdoors.
For me, this need to communicate about beekeeping just resulted in extending my use of a tool I already use for my work, the computer, and venturing into what people grandly call Information Technology and The Internet. Now, lets be sensible about this. Running a computer with internet access is more expensive than getting a daily newspaper delivered and costs more than your television. Think cable or satellite TV subscriptions and you’re getting comparable, so very few people use a computer just as a form of leisure activity and for most users there are a multiplicity of reasons to use one. It would be very hard to make a case for using a computer just for beekeeping but if you have one including beekeeping as part of the repertoire has very real benefits. I.T. can be a tremendous economy if you’re busy or have limited resources, the technology allows a degree of time independence and can provide very rapid responses. Sometimes far greater clarity of expression is possible when you are writing, while filing, addressing, tracking and even spelling can all be done for you. It is cheap for communicating over a distance so its as easy to discuss ideas with a German or Australian beekeeper as it is with one from Weybridge.
For niche subjects like beekeeping its not long before you exhaust the material in your local library, and that’s usually out of date anyway. Instead careful searches of specialist or academic libraries further afield for information can reveal its true value before you commit money and time to go and get it, or save the trip altogether by a file transfer. By far the greatest advantage though is the amount by which you can increase your knowledge about the craft by learning from a large pool of experts with a broad range of practical experience, for example, beekeepers with no previous experience of varroa are in daily contact with others who have faced the practical difficulties for years.
For the Associations one of the chief concerns is to ensure the existing membership is kept up to date and another to recruit a new influx of educated and competent young beekeepers. While members are not as far flung in Britain as they can be elsewhere the idea of holding information, about library books or swarm collectors for example, centrally and available 24hrs a day has some merit. There is every reason to suppose also that the next generation of beekeepers will be drawn from young people who have grown up using computers, so being seen in the right place could be valuable. That place is the ‘net.
It is not true to say the Internet has evolved over a number of years and ‘designed’ is not one of the words I’d choose to describe it. The Internet is a dogs breakfast of technologies which have all been lumped together, seamlessly or not, for no other reason than because it has become possible. Often they have little in common, some are simple to use and some are not, some need lots of money and hardware to work, some don’t. Even so very practical technical reasons ensure that the ‘internet’ is not the anarchic free-for all that is sometimes portrayed. Someone for example is watching to see that things like file addresses and email names are unique. You have to tell search directories where you can be found. Language, both yours and your computers, imposes a certain order and the fact that the users have common goals causes them to agree a sort of etiquette amongst themselves. Access to computers and software, as with many things, is structured and sometimes literally controlled, so that the correspondence you see is biased and censored in a very real sense.
Whereas with other media we have already developed a strategy for assessing credibility it doesn’t cope with the new technology and when using the Internet you have to try to differentiate between information and opinion or interpretation. Its also true that uncontrolled, disorganised information is not a resource. Entertaining maybe, but not a useful resource, so maybe its just as well there is some order. Finally you must remember that information is not the same thing as knowledge. Beware, compare and test.
To get the most from the ‘net you ought to understand the variety of services available. Your computer can ‘phone up bulletin boards (BBS), electronic mail (email), automatic mailing machines (listservers) and World Wide Web servers (WEB sites). It should be self-evident that you don’t let the use of a particular tool become more important than what you hope to achieve with it and computers are no exception. The biggest mistake is to get buoyed along by (or frightened away by) the technology, and forget what you were trying to do with it.
Bulletin boards are exactly what they say the are. The ones beekeepers are most likely to use are on a network called Beenet maintained by computers in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden and Catford in London. You dial the nearest of these computers direct on its own number. Beenet is not, strictly speaking, part of the Internet because the computers are using a different language to communicate but it is I.T. and a useful resource. I find it somewhat cumbersome but it, or someone attached to it, will give you access to nearly all the textual information on the Internet and some of its own and, especially if you can call at local or off peak rates, for the lowest cost. If you have an old computer or modem in the loft you want to dust off and use the Beenet is the thing to use as it demands very little in the way of equipment.
The alternative to Beenet is to pay to connect to an Internet service provider (an ISP) and use email as your mail tool. An ISP has computers that are part of the Internet and collects, stores and distributes mail messages to the other computers connected. Email is the most basic of the Internet tools and is nothing more than a electronic letter. Because you can’t afford to be permanently ‘in’ to receive your mail the ISP acts as an intermediary and your computer ‘phones them to collect it. If you know another beekeeper you can use email and correspond as usual. Where things get more interesting however is when a group of email users correspond ‘publicly’ so to speak, by posting messages for each other to read to the same computer. This then ‘displays’ them to all the members of the group. Its very much the same as posting messages on a bulletin board but is usually organised so the relationship between the messages, the ‘thread’ of the conversation, is very much clearer. These groups of people are called newsgroups and sometimes the jargon will talk about ‘usenet’ meaning the groups of people who use networked computers in this way ( user + network).
Newsgroups are a place to raise questions, try out ideas and make contacts rather than for reference. They’re handy for remote beekeepers who can keep in touch but just as a passer-by misses half a conversation and ‘gets the wrong end of the stick’ they are for participants not spectators. In our field <sci.agriculture.beekeeping> is still the main newsgroup and operates a bit like a global club chat. One of its frustrations is that not all of a conversation is posted to the public ‘newsboard’, some of the contributors sometimes skip it and revert to personal ‘mail messages and you miss out on some of the chat. Mind you sometimes this is a blessing. It can be irritating too that not everyone keeps up and someone will try to join a conversation over long ago. While there is an archive of past conversations it is difficult to search and so not generally used, consequently its not unusual to see the same topics appear over and over again. To use a newsgroup you really need to be part of it all the time, <sci.agriculture.beekeeping> changes daily and has about 800 regular members.
Rather than ‘displaying’ the newsgroup messages it is also possible to get a computer to automatically forward them to the group’s members and this is what a listserver does. The beekeepers listserver is known as BEE-L or beelist and is managed by a computer in an American college. Listservers tend not to have the passing trade that a newsgroup has partly as a natural consequence of the fact that if you subscribe you get swamped with email whether you want it or not. It is more resistant to the ‘junk mail’ that can appear in newsgroups. BEE-L has about 500 subscribers, is a little bit more intimate and tends to be more serious. You have to do more of the sorting and message filing because, unlike a newsgroup the BEE-L listserver is only relaying messages not organising them. It is used for much the same purpose as <sci.agriculture.beekeeping> and indeed many of the participants are the same. Most of the important news is cross-posted by users who are members of both. It is possible to get news and good advice from either service, just ask and someone, somewhere, will see and respond, usually within a few hours. Again the archive, although there, is almost impossible to use. As with the newsgroup BEE-L is for ephemeral information rather than reference.
Another clever use of a listserver is shown by APIS-L. This distributes a newsletter produced in Florida for local beekeepers by the agricultural advisory service. As well as delivering the copy before the paper version is produced the listserver permits discussion of the contents. The resulting feedback allows the editor to amend the final edition and this is, as far as I know, the only interactive beekeeping magazine produced.
A Web Server is what most people are thinking of when they talk about the Internet. Its not surprising these get noticed because this is the glamorous money-hungry end of the spectrum. By far the most capable, bringing you sound, colour, animation, videos and photographs, properly constructed they are wonderful at describing complex inter-related subjects for readers with different experiences and levels of comprehension. They can also be the most shallow and superficial, nothing but a flashy advertising hoarding for the initiated clique.
Full of jargon Web servers are machines on the Internet which ‘host’ information in a number of ways. They will allow remote access by obscure tools like ‘gopher’ or ‘veronica’. They might allow you to exchange files of data using something like ‘FTP’ or ‘Kermit’. For most of us they will display pages of text and graphics written in a common ‘style’ known as HTML or JAVA and to translate these pages for us (Web Pages) we use an interpreter known as a ‘browser’. Don’t be put off by the slang, Web pages and the associated software are both the most sophisticated and easiest to use of the Internet services. As with most things though easily done is not necessarily well done and the technical cleverness of a web page is no guarantee of its quality. I know of about 50 Web sites hosting beekeeping pages and its just not possible to discuss the merits of each one, there are rotten apples, green apples and nice shiny red apples. Predictably given the cost and visual appeal the suppliers and commercial apiarists are the forerunners, there are useful sites by government or academic institutions and even some (hang the expense ! ) by amateur beekeepers like me.
There is no doubt that a well designed web page that is kept up to date can provide a very useful reference service, but do not underestimate the effort that will be required if you or your association intend to provide, rather than read one. This is not the place to discuss the nuances of writing Web pages but some points are worth remembering. If, for example, you include a membership form for people to join ‘on-line’, or any other ‘interactive’ facility, you must arrange for a response. If you provide information (free) on the web how many of your members don’t need to pay your subscription anymore ? What happens if its wrong ? Web pages are as adept at displaying your incompetence and inattentiveness as they are professionalism and commitment.
Secondly do not either overestimate the ‘audience’. A beekeeping association is primarily there for its members and inhabits a precise geographical area. Carefully consider how much effort you want to spend displaying information for remote ‘alien’ recipients. Typically beekeeping pages see about 300-400 visits a month but who the visitors are is anyone’s guess. As an example consider that Guildford Division has about 150 members and in Surrey there may be say 2000 beekeepers. I’d be surprised if more than 10 of these use the Internet so that the 800 odd visits to the Division’s site since June are most unlikely to be by local beekeepers. Indeed many of the visits (we hope ! ) might be by people who are not beekeepers at all and this is important when you choose what and how to display or promote your material. If you are trying to catch a ‘passer-by’ don’t use complex images because you don’t know how they will be translated by their browser and they slow down the appearance of the page, and don’t overwhelm them with a lot of boring text until after you’ve captured their interest.
Think how people will find the page too. The Guildford page is registered with the main search ‘engines’ and linked with other Beekeeping sites on the Internet but it is also part of an organisation called the Surrey Web. This is an umbrella for a large number of commercial and non-commercial sites in Surrey promoting the region’s economic, cultural and social assets on the Internet. I am far more likely to get potential members from people using the Surrey Web than from an aimless information-superhighway surfer in Malaysia.
Lastly, I’d suggest, make the page useful and contemporary and make sure the visitor comes back, member or not. One of the purposes of Guildford’s work, still at an early stage, is to extend the division’s contact with a wider community and this is what I hope to expand. The pages have benefited from a close liaison with its host Guildford College of Further Education, gratefully uses material from Bees for Development, disease advice from the National Bee Unit and so on. It is in the interaction with external organisations that the real promotion of beekeeping will go on.
There is no doubt that the Internet is creating new opportunities for beekeepers to learn and interact, as it will for everyone. Individual apiarists can now be better informed than ever as a result. To some degree the character of beekeeping and the associations is changing too but it is vital now that they continue to extend the practical local support members need and the role of I.T. in achieving this is quite unclear. There is no harm in exploring the latest of these tools but be very realistic about what your objectives are and measure your success. Use the ‘net, don’t get used by it.