By George B. Schramm, LIBC President
As an architect, one of my primary responsibilities is to communicate. Typically, I have two audiences to communicate with: the client and the construction contractor. For the client, I would use renderings and models to communicate the intended appearance of the building. For the contractor, drawings and specifications communicate the knowledge necessary to construct the building appropriately. In both cases the instruments of communication need to be clear, concise, correct, and complete, and convey the intended work results, but the drawings and specifications are more technically oriented and require specialized knowledge, while the renderings and models are intended for a more general audience. But in both cases the goal is the same: to communicate the appropriate understanding of how the building will look when it is complete.
Science, specifically honey bee science, also has a goal: to communicate an understanding of how the honey bee functions. Honey bee scientists also have two audiences: scientists and everyone else interested in honey bees (non-scientists). As you would expect, communicating with other scientists is more technically oriented and requires specialized knowledge, while communicating with a more general audience needs “renderings and models,” i.e. comprehensible and appealing instruments of communication. But in both cases the information needs to be clear, concise, correct, and complete. Ay, there’s the rub.
While attending the EAS Conference in Rhode Island last month I had the opportunity to attend a variety of seminars, including many presented by scientists. The audience included both scientists and non-scientists, but the majority consisted of the latter, so it would be safe to assume that when choosing between the two forms of communication (e.g. technical or non-technical, drawings or renderings), the non-technical approach would be the appropriate one. And in most cases the non-technical, or at least the not-so-technical, method was how the information was conveyed, but with diverse variations of success. It wasn’t that a particular topic was uninteresting, on the contrary, the information was always fascinating and relevant, even for the hobby beekeeper, but the manner in which it was conveyed did, at times, require intense concentration and several strong cups of coffee.
The questions asked by the audience at the end of the presentation were the most telling determinant; if the questions invited the scientist to elaborate even further on the topic then that meant most people understood the content of the presentation and wanted to know more. However, if the questions just resulted in the scientist repeating portions of the presentation, then most of the audience didn’t get it the first time. To be clear, I’m not criticizing the personality of the scientist or the idiosyncrasies of their presentation style, an audience with the desire to learn about the topic at hand will easily forgive these foibles, I’m focusing on how well the scientist was able to convey the results of their research to a general audience in a comprehensible and appealing manner.
Alright, so some science presenters are less effective than others, why does this matter?
As humans, we use two fundamental tools to objectively understand and explore the world around us: math and science. Ironically, these are the same two subjects that most people report as being the most difficult to understand in high school and beyond. It would seem that although humans are naturally curious and have a predilection for solving math problems (see the study “Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group,” http://tinyurl.com/3zkyuwd), we still have a hard time using those skills in a formal process. But we don’t abandon math and science because they are difficult; to paraphrase President Kennedy, we do math and science because they are hard, because they will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, and because it is a challenge that we are willing to accept. We know what we know about honey bees and beekeeping through the employment of the disciplines math and science; it has improved our beekeeping skills and we can’t afford to abandon or ignore those disciplines because it may be difficult.
But we must also recognize that that difficulty is a barrier for most non-scientists. The discoveries made by scientists working in apiculture need to be presented at forums such as EAS, but those scientists also need to appreciate that the manner in which they communicate their research to a general audience is just as important as the research itself. Building a house will require drawings and specifications, but most of us want to see the renderings and the models; it’s same information just presented differently and the latter method substantially increases the size of the audience.
But it would be unfair to place the burden of communicating the advances in honey bee science solely with the scientific community. Effective communication requires both parties to be responsive and responsible. As the “users” of honey bee research, beekeepers should at least have a basic understanding of bee biology. One doesn’t have to be an expert in all things math and science, but we must make the effort to comprehend what we can. I have yet to hear someone state that understanding math and science, especially honey bee science, doesn’t make them a better beekeeper.
