Teach bees

Organizing a Bee School

Before students attend a bee school, a great deal of planning needs to take place:

Where will it be held?

What do we do about a curriculum?

Is there a projector there? What’s the resolution?

How is the course marketed?

What happens if class gets cancelled?

How do students sign up?

What’s the cost?

Will there be a text book?  Which one?

Will there be (a) field day(s) where students get to work with bees?

Will students purchase bees through the school?

Will there be handouts?

It makes sense for some clubs to partner with another organization – like UMaine Cooperative Extension – to take care of many of the logistics.

Then the question becomes one of money – how are class proceeds shared?

One model is to have people who take the class become members of the local club, with the club receiving a membership fee for each participant.

Bee and Beekeeping Photos

Your best source of bee and beekeeper photographs is yourself.  You have absolute control over your own photographs, and can copyright and license them as you will.

Other than your own photographs and charts, your options are to find images that are either not copyrighted, are in the public domain, or fulfill the license requirements that allow use. If keeping to a limited budget is not a priority, you can purchase image use rights from companies like Shutterstock.  Shutterstock and companies like it are aggregators of images that can be used, if you are willing to part with your money.

Then there is the concept in copyright law of “Educational Fair Use.”  One trouble is that educational institutions aren’t well defined so it isn’t always clear by whom copyrighted material can be used.  Some people also say that anything posted to the Internet is meant to be used and shared.  The mind boggles. 

This is further complicated by the question is your venture commercial? Are you really hoping students will take your course and then buy all their beekeeping supplies from you?  Some distribution licenses prohibit commercial use.

Wikipedia has a discussion of Fair Use issues.

Some companies will give you a few images that you can use for free, mostly as a teaser for you to purchase a subscription from them.  A variety of plans are available – it comes down to how many images do you want and over what time period.

As you look around you’ll find bee web sites like Randy Oliver’s scientificbeekeeping.com that allow use of their images for educational purposes if attributed.  That’s the “Photo courtesy of scientificbeekeeping.com” you see under some pictures.  Others may be usable for “non-commercial” purposes, for example says BeeBase:

“You may re-use Crown copyright protected material (excluding the Royal Arms and other departmental or agency logos) free of charge in any format for non-commercial research, private study or internal circulation within your organisation. The material must be acknowledged as Crown copyright and you must give the title of the source document/publication. When reproducing such information, Beebase encourages users to establish hypertext links to this website. 

When reproducing images, please associate the phrase "Courtesy The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), Crown Copyright" alongside each image”

Will your use satisfy the stated requirements? Maine Bee Wellness can’t answer that. At least they are very specific about their attribution requirements.

Then the are a few places like Dave Cushman’s website that says “Dave deliberately held no copyright and granted free use of any material or software, apart from family photograph…”The policy of this website has always be openness and will continue to be so. If you wish to use material you are welcome to do so, but please give a credit as follows - "Credit: Dave Cushman's website".

Federal Government photos are usually free of copyright.  Some websites (such as Flickr) allow you to see images by a certain type of  distribution license – for example Federal Works or Creative Commons.

Other well known bee photographers (like Zachary Huang) make their photographs available if the use is both non-profit and educational.

Be cautious in using collections of images, such as those shared on Pinterest.  It can be hard to know for sure who the copyright holder is.  (A basic part of Educational Fair Use is crediting the copyright holder.)  Google images can help you search for where images have been published on the web, and you may be able to track down the copyright holder doing a reverse image search.  For our Power Point Bee School presentation, there were images posted to Pinterest were traced back to coming from The Pollinator Partnership and being copyrighted by them.

You may discover a great repository of photographs and graphics you can use in your Power Points and handouts. If you do, please let Maine Bee Wellness know, and we’ll share that information.

If there is enough interest, Maine Bee Wellness could host a gallery of images created by Maine Beekeepers and appropriately licensed.  If that is something you think Maine Bee Wellness needs to do, let us know.