Icing Sugar
New Bee
Hello everyone. Perhaps it is possible to post something on this forum at the moment without getting bashed over the head by any of the usual suspects.
Winter is the season for woodwork and reading, they say. I therefore bought myself a table saw in November and made some mating nucs out of scrap wood. Very pretty they look too, painted up with their various patterns to help the queen find her way home again.
I thought I would share my experience of hunting down honey bee research papers online.
https://www.google.co.uk
Choose a few key words and put them in the search box. The fewer words the better.
Putting words within speech marks will make google search for that exact word combination rather than each individual word.
Put the letters “pdf” at the end of the string of words in your search strategy to hone it down consideraby.
Many papers will be hosted by a company called Springer. For these papers you can typically get the abstract but not the full publication. However, don’t worry… many other publication houses are more generous.
After running the search with “Apis mellifera”, repeat it with “honey bee” and perhaps even “honeybee”.
When searching for papers relating to particular diseases, first do the search using the common term for the disease and repeat it using the scientific term.
http://www.freefullpdf.com/
This web site limits the search to pdfs from the outset.
Structure your search strategies as for a Google search.
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr
A French web site that currently hosts over 700 journal articles containing the words “Apis mellifera”, over 300 with the words “honey bee” and many others of interest that contain neither of these terms. Obviously you add rather more to your search strategy to drill down to the papers relating to your interest of the moment.
Some heavyweight authors have stuff posted there (e.g. Seeley, Oldroyd, Spivak, Koeniger, Neumann, Moritz, Crailsheim). Quite a lot of the archive for the journal Apidology has been posted here.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
This U.S.-based web site is primarily intended to serve as a database for medical papers but for some reason there are quite a few honey bee-related papers there too. It indicates which of these are “free full text” and these can be downloaded.
http://www.researchgate.net
If you have an academic e-mail address then this is well worth joining. In fact, it is nothing short of amazing. Innumerable authors post copies of their research papers here for other individual users to access. Many of these papers are not freely available elsewhere. You can also request papers from members of this site that they have not yet uploaded for whatever reason… and perhaps even strike up a correspondence. There is some serious stuff on this site and it will take your understanding of bees to a totally new level. Forget almost all of the “experts” on the beekeeping forum; forget your favourite bee books; this is truly where it is at!
Big areas of honey bee research in recent years include genomics, epigenetics, endocrinology, all aspects of polyethism, immunology, local vs imported bees. Prepare to be amazed at what goes on in a bee colony.
University department web pages
If you follow up the leads given above, you will soon discover who the really exciting researchers of the moment are. If you visit the web pages for their university departments, you will normally find lists of their most important publications, often with pdfs attached.
Journal web pages
Some journal web sites are free full access (e.g. PLOS Biology) and others are have different models of variable access (e.g. Journal of Apicultural Research). Maybe I will do another post about that at some point.
Anyway, why not use these amazing resources to look up a few of your questions for yourself and post referenced summaries of your findings on this forum? (I have downloaded over 1,000 papers in the last 6 months which I am about a third of the way through now). Why not even start an online “journal club” on this forum that collectively follows up the research literature on various subjects?
I hope that this forum is on the dawn of a new era of politeness to each other. If not then I will be leaving too, and perhaps many other quiet members. "So what?" you might understandably say. Well, if better manners prevailed then the increase in the number of people who joined in conversations might surprise you all.
Winter is the season for woodwork and reading, they say. I therefore bought myself a table saw in November and made some mating nucs out of scrap wood. Very pretty they look too, painted up with their various patterns to help the queen find her way home again.
I thought I would share my experience of hunting down honey bee research papers online.
https://www.google.co.uk
Choose a few key words and put them in the search box. The fewer words the better.
Putting words within speech marks will make google search for that exact word combination rather than each individual word.
Put the letters “pdf” at the end of the string of words in your search strategy to hone it down consideraby.
Many papers will be hosted by a company called Springer. For these papers you can typically get the abstract but not the full publication. However, don’t worry… many other publication houses are more generous.
After running the search with “Apis mellifera”, repeat it with “honey bee” and perhaps even “honeybee”.
When searching for papers relating to particular diseases, first do the search using the common term for the disease and repeat it using the scientific term.
http://www.freefullpdf.com/
This web site limits the search to pdfs from the outset.
Structure your search strategies as for a Google search.
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr
A French web site that currently hosts over 700 journal articles containing the words “Apis mellifera”, over 300 with the words “honey bee” and many others of interest that contain neither of these terms. Obviously you add rather more to your search strategy to drill down to the papers relating to your interest of the moment.
Some heavyweight authors have stuff posted there (e.g. Seeley, Oldroyd, Spivak, Koeniger, Neumann, Moritz, Crailsheim). Quite a lot of the archive for the journal Apidology has been posted here.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
This U.S.-based web site is primarily intended to serve as a database for medical papers but for some reason there are quite a few honey bee-related papers there too. It indicates which of these are “free full text” and these can be downloaded.
http://www.researchgate.net
If you have an academic e-mail address then this is well worth joining. In fact, it is nothing short of amazing. Innumerable authors post copies of their research papers here for other individual users to access. Many of these papers are not freely available elsewhere. You can also request papers from members of this site that they have not yet uploaded for whatever reason… and perhaps even strike up a correspondence. There is some serious stuff on this site and it will take your understanding of bees to a totally new level. Forget almost all of the “experts” on the beekeeping forum; forget your favourite bee books; this is truly where it is at!
Big areas of honey bee research in recent years include genomics, epigenetics, endocrinology, all aspects of polyethism, immunology, local vs imported bees. Prepare to be amazed at what goes on in a bee colony.
University department web pages
If you follow up the leads given above, you will soon discover who the really exciting researchers of the moment are. If you visit the web pages for their university departments, you will normally find lists of their most important publications, often with pdfs attached.
Journal web pages
Some journal web sites are free full access (e.g. PLOS Biology) and others are have different models of variable access (e.g. Journal of Apicultural Research). Maybe I will do another post about that at some point.
Anyway, why not use these amazing resources to look up a few of your questions for yourself and post referenced summaries of your findings on this forum? (I have downloaded over 1,000 papers in the last 6 months which I am about a third of the way through now). Why not even start an online “journal club” on this forum that collectively follows up the research literature on various subjects?
I hope that this forum is on the dawn of a new era of politeness to each other. If not then I will be leaving too, and perhaps many other quiet members. "So what?" you might understandably say. Well, if better manners prevailed then the increase in the number of people who joined in conversations might surprise you all.
