A Beekeeping Association's Guide to the BIP Loss & Management Survey

The Bee Informed Partnership runs an annual Loss & Management Survey — a national, voluntary survey where individual beekeepers report colony losses and the management practices behind them. It's one of the longest-running sources of colony loss data in the country, and it exists because individual beekeepers took the time to fill it out. An association's job in this isn't to submit data on members' behalf — it's to make sure the survey doesn't quietly get skipped by an entire club.

Why this matters for your club specifically

BIP's estimates are only as representative as the beekeepers who respond. A club with 40 active members that gets even a dozen responses is contributing real signal — especially if your region is under-represented in a given year. Individual hobbyists are the group least likely to hear about the survey through normal channels (they're not on a commercial operation's mailing list, and they may not follow BIP directly), which means a club or association forwarding it at the right time genuinely moves the needle.

What to actually do as a secretary or club officer

1. Know roughly when the survey opens. BIP's survey typically covers the beekeeping year ending around April 1st and opens for responses in the following weeks — check beeinformed.org directly each year rather than relying on last year's exact dates, since timing can shift.

2. Send it to your full roster, not just active participants. The members least likely to see BIP's own outreach are often the ones with the most straightforward, single-apiary story to report — exactly the kind of response that's easy to complete and still valuable.

3. Frame it as a five-minute task, because it mostly is. The biggest barrier to participation isn't reluctance, it's members not realizing how short the survey actually is for someone with one or two apiaries. Say so explicitly in your reminder.

4. Follow up once. A single reminder two to three weeks after the initial announcement, timed before the survey closes, meaningfully increases response rates for any voluntary member action — this isn't specific to BIP, it's just how participation works for anything with a deadline.

5. Keep your own internal count, separately. Track how many members you've reminded and roughly how many said they participated (a simple show-of-hands at a meeting works). This isn't for BIP — it's so next year's officer knows whether last year's push actually worked, instead of guessing.

What this has to do with your own club's records

If your club already logs inspections, treatments, and colony losses year-round — through ApiaryBase or any other system — members already have most of what the BIP survey asks for sitting in their own inspection history, rather than needing to reconstruct a year of memory from scratch in April. That's the actual value of consistent inspection logging: not just internal club record-keeping, but making the annual research asks genuinely fast to answer. ApiaryBase's Research API is built around this — a member's ordinary inspection data, aggregated and de-identified, in a format that lines up with what BIP and USDA APHIS ask for, so contributing isn't a separate task bolted onto the season.

For the USDA side of this same picture, see how state associations approach USDA NASS reporting.