[CHALLENGE] Education about Bee Populations

How might we create education around supporting urban bee populations?

Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9ZvlYJGde2SaTg4cWxYdnNNUWM&usp=sharing

1 Like

Problem Statement:
Bee populations are in decline, even as urban bee keeping is exploding.

Key stakeholders:
Inexperienced urban beekeepers. Experienced bee keepers.

Key issues/challenges:

  1. Bee decline is due in part to urban beekeeping’s high failure rate due to inexperience, not “colony collapse disorder”
  2. Experienced beekeepers are not technologically savvy 3. There is a lack of consistent information available for novices

Key insights:

  1. 80% of new beekeepers stop after 2 years
  2. High emotional downside for failure 3. Much of the available information is incorrect and potentially harmful

Short description of your idea:
A website devoted to providing beekeepers with articles & video tutorials curated by expert beekeepers and certified by professional associations.

What need/problem are you addressing?
Lack of consistent, high quality information.

How does your solution solve the problem?
It provides novice beekeepers with a centralized source of information. Second, by actively recording and seeking out expert beekeepers (via StoryCorps or similar), it overcomes their technological aversion and helps their collective wisdom get transmitted to younger generations.

What questions do you have still?
How we address the funding issue: via public grants, private partnership, etc? How do we make sure our content is more visible than the bad information.