Michigan has about 85,000 honey bee colonies and the majority of that are involved in pollination services. While usually there is a long term relationship between a particular grower and a particular beekeeper, when the beekeeper moves away or sells his/her business, then the grower needs to locate beekeepers in a timely fashion so that crops will be pollinated in time. The reverse is true when the grower moves away or sells the business. I have received many phone calls from county agents requesting this information, but unfortunately currently the state of Michigan does not require registration and there is not a list or a database of beekeepers who are willing to pollinate.

I propose to develop two World Wide Web databases linking fruit and vegetable growers and beekeepers that rent honey bee colonies for pollination services. One database will provide fruit and vegetable growers a means to identify and locate beekeepers quickly and accurately. Another database will let beekeepers to find fruit and vegetable growers.

A PC using Windows NT will be established. This computer has the ability to run ASP (active server pages), an extension supported by Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) webserver on the Windows NT platform. The webpages written in ASP can be interfaced with an ACCESS database (ACCESS is a Windows based database program, part of the standard Windows Office software). The ACCESS-linked webpages have the following features:

1. It will allow beekeepers to logon on the web, enter their own information and setup user names with passwords. Beekeepers can later change their information with a password if needed (e.g. when they move).
2. We can receive information from beekeepers through regular mail and enter the ACCESS database.
3. On a separate page, growers can search the database in a variety of ways: by zip code, area code, county name, or beekeeper's name.
4. We can implement features to flag old information or automatically delete entries that are of certain age (say 5 years old).

A separate database for growers will be setup and address information as well as crop information (variety and acreage) will be collected. This page would allow beekeepers to locate any growers in a certain region through searching by county, telephone area code, or zip code.

A laptop computer can be brought to various growers’ meetings and the growers can be asked to enter the information directly into the computer. Again this is done through a web interface (but running locally on the laptop) that input data directly into an access database.