[copied from the original Word .docx document - BK, webmaster]

January 27, 2010 

Registration Open for the International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy Hosted by The Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Registration is now open for the first International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Heath and Policy being hosted by the Penn State Center for Pollinator Research July 24-28, 2010 at the University Park campus.

According to Christina Grozinger, associate professor of entomology and director of the center, the focus of the conference will be current research on pollinator biology and health, as well as policies related to pollinator conservation. “Pollinators are essential for both plants and animals in agricultural and natural ecosystems.” Grozinger explains. “Unfortunately, there has been a dramatic decline in both managed and native pollinator populations due to a variety of stressors, which have been highlighted by the recent reports of Colony Collapse Disorder. This conference will bring together a diverse group of experts, so we can better address these complex issues.”

The conference will include the following symposia: Behavioral Ecology, Disease Environmental Toxins, Conservation and Ecological Applications of Native Pollinators, and Status of Pollinators Worldwide. The keynote speaker will be Dr. May Berenbaum, Professor and Head of the Department of Entomology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Berenbaum is internationally recognized for both her research and conservation efforts related to pollinators, including chairing the National Research Council’s Committee on the Status Pollinators in North America in 2007. 

The conference will take place on the Penn State University Park campus amidst the mountains of central Pennsylvania and will include interaction among the participants with group meals and evening informal receptions coupled with poster presentations. The conference is being sponsored by generous donations from Häagen-Dazs and Anthropologie/Urban Outfitters, as well as Penn State's Department of Entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, and The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State.

Registration is limited to 300 participants, so be sure to register early by going to web site http://agsci.psu.edu/pollinator-conference. For more information about the conference or the Center, visit website at http://ento.psu.edu/pollinators, or contact conference organizers: Christina Grozinger, (814)-865-1895 or cmg25@psu.edu; Diana Cox-Foster, (814) 865-1022 or dxc12@psu.edu; or Ed Rajotte, (814) 863-4641 or uvu@psu.edu.

The Penn State Center for Pollinator Research is devoted to the study of pollination, pollinators and pollinator management and protection. The Center combines the resources of 26 research and education programs spanning Penn State’s Departments of Entomology, Biology, Horticulture, Crop and Soil Science and Landscape Architecture; the Arboretum at Penn State; the PA Department of Agriculture; and the USDA. Center activities are supported by government grants, corporate gifts, the beekeeping industry and Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

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Editors Contact:

Kristie Auman-Bauer

PA IPM Program

(814) 865-2839

kma147@psu.edu

Action FA0803

Dear colleagues, It is a great pleasure for us to invite you to the two COLOSS Workshops in Denmark:

• Standards on monitoring & positive feed-back loops between scientists and beekeepers. Organised by the Danish Beekeepers Association at Ankerhus, Slagelsevej 7A, 4180 Sorø, from 14th to 16th June 2010.
• Standardized protocols for honey bee vitality and diversity. Organised by the University of Aarhus at Research Centre Flakkebjerg, DK-4200 Slagelse, from the 16th to 18th June 2010.

Please send your registration details to Sonja Graugaard (sonja.graugaard@agrsci.dk) as soon as possible (deadline 28.05 2010). The number of participants is limited to a maximum of 35 persons in total for the two Workshops. Preference is given to those that have already shown interest in the meeting of Amsterdam for WG1 as well as for those that participate actively in the GEI experiment of WG4.

Each participant needs to contribute to the program, in order to be reimbursed. Please let us know the title of your presentation or your discussion issue and send your abstract, using the attached form, to Sonja Graugaard (deadline 28.05 2010).

The first workshop from 14th to 16th June is held at Ankerhus, Slagelsevej 7A, 4180 Sorø, a nice venue for smaller conferences. The total cost of full accommodation, meals and workshop is 235 €. Arrival is on Monday 14th June in the afternoon, departure on Thursday 17th June in the morning after breakfast. For your booking please forward an email to Sonja Graugaard.

The second workshop from the 16th to 18th of June is held at Research Centre Flakkebjerg. A special arrangement has been made with Hotel Antvorskov (3 star), Trafikcenter Allé, DK-4200 Slagelse. For further information see: http://hotelantvorskov.dk/uk/welcome.aspx. The hotel price is approx. 86.25 €/ night (single room) including breakfast. For your booking please email Sonja Graugaard (sonja.graugaard@agrsci.dk). The hotel is close to the Slagelse Train Station. A taxi from the train station to the hotel costs approximately 9 €. Please note that the local coin is the Danish Krone, and the EURO is not the accepted currency.

Only travel expenses will be reimbursed by COLOSS. Copenhagen Airport is the nearest destination. The registration fee for the meeting in Flakkebjerg is 55 € (Thursday and Friday lunches and coffee breaks are included in the registration fee)

We are looking forward to a very fruitful and intensive meeting. 

Local organisers: 

Asger Søgaard Jørgensen, Flemming Vejsnæs and Per Kryger

Dear colleagues,

We are proud to invite the members of COLOSS to the workshop on artificial rearing “Method standardization for larval tests”, held in Graz, Austria from 7th June (arrival day) to 9th June 2010. Please register for the workshop as soon as possible, but not later than 25. February 2010 by sending an abstract (about 200 words) to: robert.brodschneider@uni-graz.at. Notice the scientific agenda below before writing your abstract. Researchers without experience in this technique may provide abstracts describing intended studies. Also notice that only a limited number of attendants (~20) will be accepted. If there are more registrations, active contributors will be accepted preferably. All persons registered in time will receive detailed information about reimbursement, travel, accommodation and scientific programme in March. The costs will be about 200 Euro for three nights in a single room including breakfast and lunch and about 20 Euro registration fee. According to the number of participants the available reimbursement will be about 200 Euro per Person. We suggest you to apply other fundings for your travel expenses. We are looking forward to see you in June in Graz!

Scientific Agenda

The rearing of honey bee larvae under laboratory conditions is an intensively explored method holding many research potentials. The COLOSS network (COST Action FA0803) enables us to center investigators who are developing and refining in-vitro methods and such who apply these method to theoretical and practical questions. At the upcoming workshop we would like to focus on four different aspects.

• First, we want to discuss the standardisation of protocols and the option of using this method for the risk assessment of plant protection products. This requires the arrangement of ring tests among participating laboratories, as has been done before. Precise questions addressed during this session may sound like: Does the variance within season, among colonies or different strains of honey bees influence the reliability of standardized methods? What further steps are necessary to promote the use of this method? The outcome of this might be contributed to the BEE BOOK.

• Second, there should be the opportunity to focus on technical aspects and trouble shooting. What are the most commonly used protocols, modifications and problems. Key questions may be the creation of aseptic environments, or how to obtain a homogenous population of larvae of defined age.

• Third, we should consider the quality of produced workers. In-vitro rearing alters developmental dynamics of larvae and influence the worker quality by different means. Interesting questions in this session are: Do our methods produce workers comparable to those reared under natural conditions? How do we have to consider alterations?

• Fourth, we will talk about research applications. Artificially reared larvae are ideal models to study the effects of pesticides, pathogens, growth and metabolism, genetics, nutrition or rearing environment.

To balance the core areas of the workshop we ask all participants to indicate in their abstract which topic meets their interests and what they can contribute.

Karl Crailsheim,

Robert Brodschneider,

Ulrike Riessberger-Gallé,

Jutta Vollmann

Graz, Austria, 8 February 2010

Athens2010

Proceedings (February 2010 / pdf)

Agenda (Download as Word .doc)

Registration form (Download as Word .doc)

Agenda

Registration on site is also required (fees: 50.- €, dinner at 19.01.2010 included)

Accommodation

Please do not register with Hotel Tulip Inn before you have received a confirmation of your participation in the workshop. You will receive detailed information about how to make a reservation for your stay in Tulip Inn Amsterdam Riverside.

Joint meeting of 

• Canadian Honey Council, 
• American Beekeeping Federation 
• Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists
• American Association of Professional Apiculturists
• Apiary Inspectors of America. 

West Jet offers 10% discount off regular fares for travel during the convention period.

 Quote promo code QC#6028 when booking. 

Date: Tuesday, Jan. 12 – Saturday, Jan. 16 

Location: 

Wyndham Orlando Resort 

8001 International Drive Orlando, 

Florida 32819 . 

Phone 877-999-3223 or 407-351-2420

Click here to get the NEW programm information as MS-Word document for download.

Click here to download the Proceedings of the Workshop.

Deadline for registration: September 21st, 2009

Inscriptions limited to 20 people

Registration fee: 50 € (+20€ only for those interested in the Optional day 22.10.09)

Arrival to Guadalajara City:  Guadalajara is a city located 50 km from Madrid. Arriving at any of the terminal in the Madrid-Barajas Airport you can take the underground “METRO”. Take metro (Line 8 pink) as far as “Nuevos Ministerios”. This station is connected with train station (CERCANIAS- RENFE) and there you can take Line C2 to Guadalajara (green in the map) up to Guadalajara. At the train station in Guadalajara you can take the bus number 32 to the Avenida del Ejército where the AC Hotel is located

Scope of Workshop:

Up to the moment, two different microsporidia species have been shown to infect Apis mellifera: Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae. While the disease due to N. apis has been widely studied, those due to N. ceranae only has been studied in the last four years. Due to the recent description of this last agent, there are several question about the epidemiology, pathology, diagnostic and control that have to bee answered. The workshop “Nosema disease: lack of knowledge and work standardization” has been designed to put all the knowledge together and to standardize some specific aspects for researching. The workshop goal will be to answer the most of questions that the researchers have nowadays or to determine how that questions could be studied to get answered. With this objective, all the COLOSS member will be asked for questions that feel have to be answered in an open call (even in the case they are not interested to join to the workshop). Questions will be grouped by topic and speakers will describe what it is know and unknown in every topic and a discussion will be made afterwards.

Organizing comity:

Mariano Higes, Raquel Martín, Aránzazu Meana,

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

It is NOT SUFFICIENT to type "approved" (or "objections") or so without your name. 

Though the name appears on the website together with the date, it does not appear in a printout of the website if your name is not explicitly written in the commentary field itself. Therefore:

Please type: "Approved" (or "Objected") in the title field AND your name in the second text field of the comment.

Thank you very much in advance for your cooperation!

Peter Neumann, Action Chair

http://www.coloss.org/documents/Vth_Coloss_Conference_Proceedings.pdf

the draft version of the agenda is available only for logged-in users:

draft agenda

[more information will follow soon]

• Registration form (new MS Word document)
• GEI test protocol (PDF)
• GEI genotype  allocation (new version, 2009-06-04)

Programm

Tuesday (28.07.2009)

Arrival at Kirchhain

19:30 

Welcome and social gathering 

Wednesday (29.07.2009) 

08:00-08:30 

Registration 

08:30-10:30 

Standardization of colony performance and vitaliy tests: contributed talks 

10:30-11:00 

Coffee break 

11:00-13:00 

Biological and biotechnical disease control: contributed posters and discussion 

13:00-14:00 

Lunch 

14:00-18:00 

Field training: colony performance testing and biotechnical control methods 

 

Thursday (30.07.2009)    

08:00-10:30 

Genotype-environment interactions on bee vitality: contributed talks, discussion of a common test protocol 

10:30-11:00 

Coffee break 

11:00-13:00 

Testing and breeding for colony vitality: discussions of international recommendations 

13:00-14:00 

Lunch 

14:00-18:00 

Field training - vitality and survival testing of colonies 

 

Friday (31.07.2009)   

08:00-10:30 

Transfer to Schwarzenau 

10:30-13:00 

Visit of the Bavarian colony test station "Schwarzenau" 

13:00-14:00 

Lunch 

14:30-17:30 

Visit of the Bavarian bee institute "Veitshöchheim" 

17:30-19:00 

Transfer to Triesdorf 

 

Saturday (01.08.2009)   

09:00-17:00 

Representation of the national breeder cooperation "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Toleranzzucht" including a visit of the local training centre "Triesdorf" and demonstration at a drone congregation area 

17:00-21:00  

Return to Kirchhain or Frankfurt/Main (Airport) 

 

Sunday (02.08.2009) 

Departure 

 

Local Organization committee:

• Ralph Büchler: ralph.buechler@llh.hessen.de (Tel.: +49 6422 940 613)
• Marina Meixner: marina.meixner@llh.hessen.de (Tel.: +49 6422 940 639)
• Ina Heidinger: ina.heidinger@llh.hessen.de (Tel.: +49 6422 940645)

Contact:

Arrival and social gathering in the evening

20:00 Dinner in Tulip Inn

Monday, 25.05.2009: Hotel Tulip Inn Amsterdam Riverside

08:30-09:15

Registration and Coffee 

09:15-09:30 

Welcome

09:30-10:30  

Plenary talk by Dr. R. Jongman vom Alterra Wageningen UR: Biodiversity monitorin in Europe, upscaling and downscaling between species and regions. In hist talk, Dr. Jongman will describe the methodology of the EBONE project (and BIOBIO see the links below) on how a integrated monitoring can be set up and in which way geographical information can be used for analysis of the observed data. http://www.alterra. wur.nl / http://www.ebone.wur.nl / http://www.biobio-indicator.org 

10:30-11:10 

Plenary talk by Romée van der Zee: "Evaluation and implementation of the first COLOSS basic questionnaire" 

11:10-11:30 

Coffee Break 

11:30-12:20 

Plenary talk be Flemming Vejsnaes: "Implementation of the monitor for the extension service" 

12:30-13:30 

Lunch 

13:30-15:00 

Open discussion on Basic Questionnaire, and additional questionnaires 

15:00-15:30 

Energy break 

17:00-18:30 

Open discussion on Monitoring for the extension servcie 

20:00-open 

Social dinner in the old town of Amsterdam 

Tuesday, 26.05.2009 Hotel Tulip Inn

09:00-10:00 

5 minutes talks by participants 

10:00-11:00 

Discussion on the modular integration of 2 monitoring questionnaires: basic and extension service 

11:00-11:30 

Coffee break 

11:30-13:00 

Discussion on next steps for the monitoring projects 

13:00-14:30 

Lunch, end of workshop meeting 

Registration on site is also required (fees: 50.- €, dinner at 24.05.2009 included) 

 

Accomodation

Please register as soon as possible online by yourself with Hotel Tulip Inn to ensure that all of us can stay in one place. The Hotel Tulip Inn (www.tulipinnamsterdamriverside.nl) is 10 minutes away from Amsterdam and is within the COST reimbursement limits. Please mention COLOSS arrangement when you make your reservation.

Location and information:

Tulip Inn Amsterdam Riverside

Provinciale weg 38

1108 AB Amsterdam Zuid Oost

Tel.: +31 20 312 14 16

Fax.: +31 20 312 14 65

info@tulipinnamsterdamriverside.nl

www.tulipinnamsterdamriverside.nl

Romée van der Zee

Dutch Centre for Bee Research

e-mail: romee.van.der.zee@beemonitoring.org

Phone: +31 515 52 11 07

Agenda

Monday, 18.05.2009 - Hotel Glocke

Tuesday, 19.05.2009 - Swiss Bee Research Centre

Program:

Invitation to the first Management Committee meeting of COST Action FA0803

‘Prevention of honeybee Colony Losses (COLOSS)’

Dear member

This note is the official invitation to the first Management Committee meeting of COST Action FA0803 to be held on 21 November 2008 in the COST Office, Avenue Louise 149, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.

The draft agenda is as follows:

21 November 2008: 10.00-17.00 (sandwich lunch will be provided by COST)

1. Welcome
2. Adoption of the agenda
3. Presentation of the delegations
4. General information on COST mechanism and on the funding of coordination
5. Status of the COST Action
6. Agreement on the internal rules of procedure for the Management Committee of the COST Action
7. Election of Chair (and Vice-Chair) of the Action
    Election of Grant-Holder
8. Working plan for the implementation of the COST Action (Memorandum of Understanding).
- objectives and working programme
- working method - organisation and management (including working groups)
- distribution of tasks
- time-table
9. Place and date of next meeting
10. Miscellaneous
11. Closing

Please note that some COST Parties interested in the Action have not yet accepted the Memorandum of Understanding or nominated their national representative(s).

The Memorandum of Understanding for the COST Action FA0803 has been approved by the CSO on 18/06/2008.  The period within which COST member Parties can join this Action without any conditions being imposed, runs for twelve months from the date of approval of the Committee of COST Senior Officials.

If a COST Party intends to participate in the Action and if this has not already been done, it would be necessary to:

-    implement the administrative procedure required to accept the Memorandum of Understanding of the Action as soon as possible;
-    nominate up to two national representative(s) for the Management Committee, using the COST online nomination tool.  Only nominated delegates can be reimbursed for the participation.

Please note that the COST National Coordinator shall ensure that all information regarding this meeting is forwarded to the nominated national representative(s) of this Action.

Best regards


Albino Maggio
Science Officer COST FA0803