Dear Beekeepers,
2021 DNA BARCODING AND HABITAT DATA RESULTS ARE LIVE!!!!
You should have (or are about to) receive automated emails informing you that your results are ready. They can be viewed in your sample history table at the bottom of the ‘Taking Part’ tab on our website https://honey-monitoring.ac.uk . You will need to log into your account first.
Habitat and Crop results: Habitat in the 2 km surrounding your logged location
As the satellite data is not collected across all parts of the UK, some of you will not receive these results. Please see Taking Part for more information. Further, habitat data has also been given for 2022 returns. These are based on the current land use maps. These will be updated with the species data in 2023 .
Species results: Relative abundance of the DNA for the top plant taxa found within your ‘snapshot’ of honey. Also, a list of all plant taxa for which DNA was found within your honey
There will be a very small number of participants for whom we were unable to generate sequence data. Some samples either fail to provide plant DNA amplicons or fail during sequencing. Sorry if you are one of these 20 or so. It will be a chemistry failure so please do not be put off returning honey in the future.
NHMS 2022
Don’t forget that HNMS2022 is well underway- over 1100 sample packs have been dispatched and more than 400 samples returned. Thank you! Please keep them coming in, and don’t forget to request your sample pack before the beginning of October (see useful information below) if you wish to be included. Although we anticipate that results will be ready next spring/summer, please remember we are an environmental research institute and are not providing a service. We pass on your results as a thank you for taking part in our scheme and we can only give a rough estimation of when results are likely to go live.
Finally, I would like to personally thank you all - this will be my last newsletter - for supporting our scheme, for teaching me so much and for your environmental enthusiasm. I have really enjoyed developing the NHMS- uptake has surpassed my wildest dreams! Hopefully, in my successor’s hands there are lots exciting things (and research opportunities) to come.
Best wishes,
Anna
Dr Anna Oliver
(the NHMS Team too)
Useful information
Requesting a sample pack
Create an online user account on our website https://honey-monitoring.ac.uk. This only needs to be done once and enables us to have an account we can report your results to. We also ask for your address so we can send sample packs to you. No personal data is ever shared.
Log on and visit your 'Taking part' tab, click on ‘request a sample pack’ and follow the instructions to create a submission. We only ask a couple of questions, importantly location, to enable a pack request. This needs to be done every time you desire a new sample pack.
Currently we allow 2 samples/beekeeper a year and the 1st needs to be returned before the 2nd sample pack can be dispatched. This second sample could be from an alternative location if you wish.
Details on how to collect a sample are included within each sample pack (also,https://honey-monitoring.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/nhms-2022-sample-pack-letter ).
Cut off dates for 2022
Sample pack requests: Friday 7th October
Sample packs can be requested at any time however, those after the October cut-off date will not be sent out until the following year.
Sample pack returns: Friday 4th November
Any samples arriving after this date will be archived only. Unused sample packs can be kept and used in any subsequent year.
Questions?
Please visit our FAQs page or email honey@ceh.ac.uk .