Daniel,
Please read Adam's report:
http://www.vpqueenbees.com/awa/FNE08-631_final.pdf
Note that the costs were about $50 total, plus time (his estimate of 1.75 hours/colony for the 3 tests seems a bit much....does it really take anywhere near 10 minutes to open a colony and find frames with active brood?)...but even if we take his numbers for the timing, that comes to a total of 35 hours of work (plus making a web page, a few photos and a graph).
What was done in those 35 hours with $50 worth of supplies? He did mite counts on his own colonies in a standard way that any number of those that go around and speak to beekeeping groups would tell you to sample mites. Nothing new was attempted. Nothing was compared to anything else. There was no evaluation of anything. All that appears to have been done is a bee breeder doing a few mite counts.
I am all for good research. I'm not sure this qualifies as research at all (good or bad).
What do you think was learned here?
Personally, I'd be embarrased to take $4347 as a SARE grant for this. $4347-$50(for supplies)=$4297. Take the 35 hours he has accounted for in the sampling, add another 35 hours to do the web page, photos and graph (probably closer to 10 hours, but let's work with 35), and you end up with Adam being paid over $60/hour to do standard mite samples of his own breeding stock (that I assume he was already doing mite counts on one way or another)...and comparing this method of doing mite samples to NOTHING.
I don't see value being created with over $4,000 in resources being spent. I do see a commercial breeder getting paid with a SARE grant to do exactly what he should already be doing (and probably was already doing).
Funny how assumptions are relative. I'm sorry if you felt that the grant we received and performed
according to our agreement with SARE was as you state:
"I don't see value being created with over $4,000 in resources being spent"
The SARE people were very happy with the results, actually. The main
expenses were for the bees and establishing the colonies. We were going to
use a randomized block design in two sites. The colonies we used needed to
be established...all of this is described in the grant report. The control
colonies did so poorly that we pretty much had to scrap the original
experiment, as stated in the report. We salvaged what we could and did the
Alcohol Wash Assay, as per the report and with SARE's approval.
The cost was mainly for time and travel. We had to get the colonies set up.
The experiment would not have been valid if we'd had used established
colonies. You can't get SARE grant money for equipment. Also, SARE pays you
after you perform the research. We came up with the money to do the
experiment. If SARE felt that we were not completing our part of the
arrangement, they would not have reimbursed us for the costs we estimated
and submitted.
However, your opinion of what we were granted, based on your knowledge of
what occurred is certainly valid. That's your right.
Since SARE at the level we were dealing with: "Farmer Grant" is used to
help farmer's with "on the farm research" to make their production more
sustainable, I feel that the research was totally successful. We learned how to conduct
standardized mite counts using the Alcohol Wash Assay over a season,
learned that the assay is both useful for selection and to keep track of
the mite population, and learned that our selection was leading to lower
phoretic mite counts in our bee population. This is a selection tool we
use as part of our breeding program.
I'm sorry that you feel the research we did wasn't valid or useful--we do
get quite steady stream of hits on the Alcohol Wash Assay info we put on
the internet so people are reading about the assay.
Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com