Big Island Beekeepers Association (BIBA) March Monthly Meeting
We have the pleasure of hosting guest speaker Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, who some of you may have heard speak at the monthly Western Apicultural Society mini Zoom Conferences. He will be talking about his research over the years and his current project, an app called Bee Health Guru to help beekeepers detect diseases in the hive! Here’s his bio:
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Bromenshenk has a Ph.D. in entomology and 49 years of experience working with honey bees worldwide. For 20 years, he was the statewide director of Montana’s EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) in energy research and education, co-founded Bee Alert Technology, Inc., a technology transfer and contract research company, and was President of the Western Apicultural Society in 2004, 2014, and again in 2019-2022. He pioneered the use of honey bees for pollution monitoring and the liquid nitrogen-freeze assay for bee hygienic behavior. He and his research teams developed and patented Smart Hives for bee management, Acoustic Scanning for detection and diagnosis of honey bee pests and diseases, Conditioning (training) of bees to search for landmines, IEDs, drug labs, and dead bodies, and Decimeter resolution LIDAR for locating, tracking, and mapping forager bees. Now semi-retired from the University of Montana he continues to teach as the lead for UM’s Online Master Beekeeping program. In 2019, his Bee Alert team launched a successful Kickstarter project to fund an ongoing citizen science project to detect and map honey bee diseases worldwide and tune their Bee Health Guru acoustic app (www.beehealth.guru). Dr. Bromenshenk has several published chapters in peer-reviewed monographs and eighty-nine articles listed under Google Scholar. He is now working with a UM team and a team in Manhattan, KC, on a beekeeping course for US soldiers and others interested in Commercial Beekeeping.
- Event Area: East Hawaiʻi, South Hawaiʻi, West Hawaiʻi, North Hawaiʻi