Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Agriculture/Beekeeping task force/Archive 1

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. Also, I note that yours is a comparatively new project. You may be interested in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide, which has a lot of information regarding project organization from several of the most successful WikiProjects. Please feel free to add your project in the relevant sections, or, if you aren't sure of yourself, tell me where you want it put and I will insert it. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 16:50, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Alert

Something is causing bees to actually and literally disappear. Cause is unknown. This has been on all of the news services. 205.240.146.224 05:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

This could mean WAR over food, as bees pollinate crops. 205.240.146.224 05:58, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Something in the papers in the UK a week or so ago about hornets - more research needed probably. Martinp23 10:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

What is Wood Honey?

Hi

I was told that Wood Honey was materially different from floral honey. Wood honey is from the nectar-like substance excreted by lice on the trees (or so I was told, and this is my poor translation from Dutch). Is like sugar ants farming aphids? Could someone confirm this?

Cheers Robin

RobinAllenson 09:07, 21 July 2007 (UTC)RobinAllenson some woodie stemed plants also trees secrete a sweet substance /ie maple sugar.I have bees and see them collect this and it is refered to as honey dew I am Sukeljuma an illinois bee keeper hope this helps you —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.206.23.4 (talk) 15:38, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi Robin, yes you are referring to Honeydew (German: Waldhoenig). Aphids suck out sap from plants (e.g. lime trees) and exude a sticky substance, which bees collect. It's thought to be the original 'Manna from heaven'. Dublinblue (Simon in Dublin) (talk) 23:56, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Proposed merger with WikiProject Agriculture

For the purposes of centralized discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Agriculture#Proposed merger with WikiProject Beekeeping. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 16:53, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

André Kertész

Just curious why André Kertész is an article being watched by the Beekeeping task force. I skimmed the article. It says he was a photographer. Was he a beekeeper as well? Thanks,AJseagull1 (talk) 21:10, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

He's in the Category:Beekeepers, which was the reason for that article being tagged. The article says he became a beekeeper in the early 1920's, but left the field shortly thereafter. If the rest of you think he don't belong, feel free to remove the category and/or banner. John Carter (talk) 21:19, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 20:47, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Beekeeping

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 22:33, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Milestone Announcements

All WikiProjects are invited to have their "milestone-reached" announcements automatically placed onto Wikipedia's announcements page. Milestones could include the number of FAs, GAs or articles covered by the project. No work need be done by the project themselves; they just need to provide some details when they sign up. A bot will do all of the hard work. Click here for more information or to sign your project up.

I thought this WIkiProject might be interested. Ping me with any specific queries or leave them on the page linked to above. Thanks! - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 21:37, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps invitation

This message is being sent to WikiProjects with GAs under their scope. Since August 2007, WikiProject Good Articles has been participating in GA sweeps. The process helps to ensure that articles that have passed a nomination before that date meet the GA criteria. After nearly two years, the running total has just passed the 50% mark. In order to expediate the reviewing, several changes have been made to the process. A new worklist has been created, detailing which articles are left to review. Instead of reviewing by topic, editors can consider picking and choosing whichever articles they are interested in.

We are always looking for new members to assist with reviewing the remaining articles, and since this project has GAs under its scope, it would be beneficial if any of its members could review a few articles (perhaps your project's articles). Your project's members are likely to be more knowledgeable about your topic GAs then an outside reviewer. As a result, reviewing your project's articles would improve the quality of the review in ensuring that the article meets your project's concerns on sourcing, content, and guidelines. However, members can also review any other article in the worklist to ensure it meets the GA criteria.

If any members are interested, please visit the GA sweeps page for further details and instructions in initiating a review. If you'd like to join the process, please add your name to the running total page. In addition, for every member that reviews 100 articles from the worklist or has a significant impact on the process, s/he will get an award when they reach that threshold. With ~1,300 articles left to review, we would appreciate any editors that could contribute in helping to uphold the quality of GAs. If you have any questions about the process, reviewing, or need help with a particular article, please contact me or OhanaUnited and we'll be happy to help. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 22:24, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:56, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Resignation

You know what. I just wanted help with this one artice. Most of the time, I edit articles about Japanese video games and old NASCAR races. I don't have time to edit bee-related articles as well. Please accept my resignation from your Wiki Project. GVnayR (talk) 22:04, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

proposed move at Johann/Jan Dzierzon

There is a proposed move over at the Johann/Jan Dzierzon article that may be of interest to the members of this project: [1].radek (talk) 20:27, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Beekeeping articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the Beekeeping articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 22:02, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Just a general plea to editors...

Since you are just starting out, now would be the best time to establish the policy that a wikiproject should have standards, and that one such standard for this wikiproject will be that content be placed in the article for which it is most appropriate. If, for example (and this is obviously not a hypothetical example) a new reference appears in print discussing the Italian bee (Apis mellifera ligustica), then the primary place for this content should be the Italian bee article, and only included in the Apis mellifera article if it is pertinent to all subspecies of mellifera (or if the subspecies is unknown), and only included in the honey bee article if it is pertinent to all species of Apis. It does not serve anyone's interest if an article has large amounts of content that properly belong in a different, more specific, article. If anything, a beekeeper should be especially careful about making such distinctions, because a beekeeper cannot handle and care for all subspecies in exactly the same way. You do not want to apply information about one subspecies to a different one, because that runs risks. Likewise, I'd urge you to stress the need for recent, peer-reviewed citations to support content. Beekeeping has a long, rich history, but with such a history comes lots of outdated beliefs and folklore, which needs to be labeled as such rather than presented as fact. There are many peer-reviewed publications on bees and beekeeping, a good number of them available online, and such resources should be the preferred source, and cited whenever they are used. Good luck, Dyanega 23:49, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Organizing the relationships between bee-related articles

I have never been comfortable with the amorphous relationships between our bee-related pages. Some topics seem misplaced, others simply inappropriate. I would like to ask that we take some time to sketch out roughly what content we would consider ideal on the major pages in Category:WikiProject Beekeeping articles. I'm not sure that I'm really qualified to make the first pass at that plan but I've opened a placeholder page at /structure. Corrections, changes and expansions would be appreciated. Rossami (talk) 01:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Beekeeping

I see that one of the group's goals is to get beekeeping to WP:GA status. I know nothing about beekeeping, but I see that apiculture on FR is a featured article. Though I don't think it would make the cut as an WP:FA here (or as a new one on FR), I'm positive it's GA level. Can anyone here do better? (Glance at it even if you don't read French -- the diagrams will give you an idea of its quality) If so, I'm not going to translate it. If not, I'll definitely consider it. (Please respond on my talk page) --Zantastik talk 22:18, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi - having seen that article a few times, I agree that it's probably not up to our FA standard, but yes, I think it goes to GA (in parts, at least). I've already done some of it - namely "The art of Beekeeping" (or similar), and I'll be happy to help with it. We can, if you want collaboration, set up a translation dept at Wikipedia:WikiProject Beekeeping/Translation. Thanks, Martinp23 22:32, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Wildlife Barnstar

There is currently a barnstar proposal at Wikipedia:Barnstar and award proposals/New Proposals#Wildlife Barnstar for a barnstar which would be available for use for this project. Please feel free to visit the page and make any comments you see fit. Badbilltucker 15:29, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Qualifications?

I'm interested in the project, but my experience is mostly limited to honey varietals and fermentation. Not sure if there's a place for me here or if I should just stick to contributing piecemeal. -MalkavianX 20:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

That's the great thing about Wikipedia. Everyone gets to add their 'two cents,' and if it is disorganized at first, someone will come in and organize it all. The point is to put the information all together at the begining. -Kristan Wifler

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 16:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Bees and inebriation

Please take a look at my rough draft at User talk:Filll/beedrunk and give me your opinion.--Filll 21:28, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

With the help of User:Dyanega, I have now revised User talk:Filll/beedrunk and I am pondering publishing it on WP as Bees and intoxication or some such title. Comments?--Filll 23:19, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

For what it is worth, and I do NOT have the cite to hand but think it is from the Gayre/Papazian book, if the water content in honey rises above 15% the honey will spontaneously ferment from airborne yeast and kill the hive. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 20:56, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

At 15%, it certainly will not ferment. According to most judging standards, honey should be between 16.0 and 18.6% moisture after extraction. Fermentation doesn't begin until about 20-22%. That will not occur to honey in a healthy hive. For one thing, once the bees have dried the nectar down to the right level, they cap it off with wax to protect it. About the only way you can get honey with a moisture in the range to ferment is to either pull it early (before the bees are done drying it) or leave it exposed (because honey is strongly hydrophylic and will pull moisture from the air). Neither of those situations will kill the hive unless the beekeeper attempts to feed it back to them and does so at a time when there is little or no other forage. Rossami (talk) 23:17, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Interesting. I have to admit, beekeeping sounds very intriguing to me, the more I learn about it. --Filll 23:30, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Honey fact tag and explanation at Talk:Honey

Perhaps someone at this wikiproject can take a look at the fact tag I added and weigh in on the talkpage. Thanks!--Isotope23 19:22, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Weird template mess up?

I tried to flag Thelytoky for cleanup and it added a template instead about user disputes. Chibimagic (talk) 02:08, 2 March 2008 (UTC) chibimagic

Leaflet for Wikiproject Agriculture/Beekeeping task force at Wikimania 2014

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:

Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (talk) 16:48, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 04:55, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Are there enough articles on Wikipedia to justify an Outline of beekeeping?

Here's a discussion about subject development you might find interesting.

The Transhumanist 23:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Ross Rounds?

The article on comb honey contains two mentions of "Ross Rounds", which I understand to be a particular brand of comb frame. The article says:

This problem [of propolis buildup] has been largely circumvented with the adoption of specialized frames, notably Ross Rounds, ...

Are "Ross Rounds" really notable here? Or are they just one of many available brands of frame?

Virtually all commercial beekeepers and a large percentage of other beekeepers produce comb honey using Ross Round equipment...

Is this true? If it is, it needs a citation to a reliable source that is not affiliated with Ross Rounds. This sentence continues:

...as it provides the best combination of reasonable cost and labor savings compared to other methods.

This appears to be someone's opinion. But I did not want to remove it, because I know nothing about beekeeping, and I thought it was just possible that it was accepted common knowledge. But Ross Rounds are not mentioned in any other article, so I was suspicious.

I hope folks here who are better-informed will take a look at this article and clean it up as needed. Thanks. —Dominus (talk) 21:09, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Ross Rounds are Bee-O-Pac systems are the two primary ways of doing comb honey, other than just cutting the comb out out of the frame and putting it into a box This is called a "Hogg Cassette". Ross Rounds and Bee-O-Pac are sort of the "pc and mac" of comb honey. I'd say about 75% of all people using a specialized comb system are using Ross Rounds, as bee-o-pac is a relatively newcomer to the comb honey scene.

As far as a citation for Ross Rounds vs. other types of systems - this is one of the best "history of comb honey" articles I could find within a few google searches: http://www.badbeekeeping.com/beeblog.htm (The direct link: http://www.badbeekeeping.com/beeblog2010.htm#20100105)

Ross rounds probably aren't the most reasonable re: cost/effort, but they are absolutely the easiest to do with because of the ubiquity and support it's earned in the american beekeeping community. This can be verified by looking at beekeeping supply catalogues: every major company in the US sells ross round equipment, and other types of equipment are occasionally sold. -- cameo (talk) 02:11, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Archived a few threads

I've archived some inactive threads to subsections which were notifications about discussions that have since been closed. — Cirt (talk) 12:33, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Category:Honey plants

Since this category is supported by this group, I thought I'd post this here as well.

Can someone clarify what the scope of Category:Honey plants is, and why it exists? I've recently had an editor add it as a category to things like Saguaro cactus, the entire 1,500+ species in the genus Acacia and the entire 4,000+ species in the Ericaceae. This suggests that it should include every species of flowering plant on the planet that is ever used as forage for bees. As such the complete category will end up containing at least 3 million entries. After all, even some obscure, undiscovered plant of the Australian outback or the Amazon Jungle is undoubtedly a forage plant for some bees at some time. Is this really the proposed scope of this category? And if so, what does it hope to achieve? It would be far more efficient to list the angiosperms that aren't "honey plants" by that standard. Moreover the category seems close to meaningless with such a broad scope. It's actually less informative than the category "plants with shallow roots" or the category "plants used as food for grasshoppers". What information do we hope that readers will get by having a category with millions of entries that has >75% overlap with the taxon angiosperms?

It this stage I am considering nominating this category for deletion. I could see its validity if it only listed commercially important bee forages, but as category that is currently listing virtually every angiosperm on the planet, I can't see what information it provides to readers.

Is there some way we could limit this category to keep it at a manageable and useful size?

Any feedback prior to nomination for deletion will be appreciated.Mark Marathon (talk) 07:54, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Strange honey

Please help me identify and place these images. I took them in Haikou, Hainan, China. The stuff is rock hard, very heavy and dense, obviously dug up from under the ground (always at the base of a small tree), smells a bit like honeysuckle, and is very pungent. Sorry about the low resolution. Next time the man comes around, I will take better shots.

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Anna Frodesiak (talk) 03:28, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

This is now an article: Wild honey Anna Frodesiak (talk) 21:56, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

To the beekeeping task force: Here is an article upon which I did a heavy copy edit because it was so poorly written. Even so, being only a copy editor and not an apiarist, I cannot judge the overall accuracy of the information it contains. The original writer has given no sources. I therefore present it to you for review, at your leisure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_honey SamJohn2013 (talk) 15:39, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Honey bucket listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Honey bucket to be moved to bucket toilet. This page could be of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here.

Basically, some people are arguing that the term honey bucket for a dry toilet that is using a bucket is outdated and limited to North American use mainly, and that the better term would be bucket toilet or bucket latrine. Others oppose this suggestion. Does anyone from the beekeeping community have an opinion? If yes, then please head over to here and get involved in the discussion, thanks. EvM-Susana (talk) 17:54, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

This is borderline WP:CANVASSING. The guidelines ask that any notices of debates and the audiences to which they're delivered should be neutral. This notice states only one side of the argument, reducing the other to merely, "others oppose". Further, it's been delivered to an audience that likely has very little involvement with toilets made out of 5 gallon buckets but might be horrified to contemplate that a term they use to mean to a very tasty food substance is also used to mean human excrement. Msnicki (talk) 20:47, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Assistance requested

Beekeeping in India seems like a notable topic, in the category tree of Category:Beekeeping by country. It needs major and vast improvement. Could any editors assist with this? AusLondonder (talk) 08:34, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

this is great

I didn't even know you guys existed. Good to find other fans of honey.

I just started Clover honey and Buckwheat honey. We could really do a lot more. Honey is so important culturally and economically, it really deserves much more inclusion in Wikipedia. Sole Flounder (talk) 22:19, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

CfD nomination of Category:Honey plants

Category:Honey plants has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page.