Using social media for bee science (or science in general) has become increasingly common over the past decade. It began with students talking about their thesis projects and nowadays even older scientists (like me) are talking about their work. This is good at many levels.
Research, in the end, isn’t something a few nerds do to satisfy their own curiosity. Or at least not only. The main thing about research is to increase the knowledge to understand our world in a better way. Without science, you wouldn’t be reading this blog, have your smartphone, or you wouldn’t even have varroa treatments. To bring it back to bees.
It took me a while to understand the possibilities and benefits of science communication on social media. For a few years now, I’m doing that for myself quite successfully on LinkedIn. And this opened a door. Because also larger research projects nowadays have a working package called “dissemination” or “knowledge transfer” or something like that. Actually, it’s often a requirement for the funding.
MEDIBEES – doing social media for somebody else
This working package includes social media activities together with other things. But here’s the point: posting things that make sense takes time. Sometimes it’s given to agencies, who don’t know that much about bees. How should they. I’m obviously not as expert on social media, but I know a thing or two about bees and their health. In other cases, the postings and other communication activities remain something that has to be done on top to all the other things.
That was the case also for MEDIBEES, a project that aims to maintain honey bee diversity in the Mediterranean and find solutions for sustainable beekeeping in that area. Especially coming from global warming. The climate crisis is an important challenge for beekeeping in the Mediterranean. Beekeepers are very affected by this. So, this project aims to assess the current situation and find solutions for the main issues and stressors.
The coordinators of the project knew my activities on LinkedIn and asked me to do the same for them. On three different channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Check it out!
What I learned from using social media for bee science
Obviously, doing social media for yourself or for somebody else is different. I learned a lot in the past year from doing both. First of all, every channel has a different audience: LinkedIn is still a business network, longer captions are ok there. Facebook is used by older people than Instagram. So, a research project that wants to reach as many people as possible needs a presence in different channels. Which is different to what I do for my business – there I focus on LinkedIn, though I’m playing around with Insta to see how it could work.
Then, I noticed how important it is to explain the basics. Not every beekeeper knows about the biology of the animal they’re dealing with. So, in the MEDIBEES project, I explain not only the experiments, but also more general knowledge. Like, that bees need water, too. Or what a subspecies is (a defined population of a species isolated from other of the same species). And why that matters.
For other research projects it could be basics of pollination. Or bee nutrition. Things that for the researchers in the projects are obvious. But they aren’t necessarily for the people that consume social media posts. So, it’s important to talk about that, too. Because otherwise people don’t even understand what you’re talking about. And why they should even care.
Science matters
What brings me to the main reason for using social media for bee science. Small snippets of information sink in easier. It feeds curiosity. Though there’s always somebody telling you that you missed something, that’s not the point. Social media posts are a very easy doorway into complex things. You can’t throw a whole textbook at somebody who doesn’t know much about a topic. But if you tickle his curiosity with a small piece of information, it may open a whole new world to someone. I don’t know how many things I discovered because of social media.
This is even more important considering that social media are becoming the most used source of information, especially for young people. If scientists don’t communicate here, they miss out on so many people. Social media is used by those who spread fake news, spam, and even worse things. So, in this increasingly complex world, we have to use the opportunity to explain that complexity.
Science matters. It’s the only approach that helps us to understand the world as it is. Is it perfect? No. Every finding adds to the picture. It’s never perfect or the absolute truth. There’s also the possibility that the picture changes in a way you didn’t expect. With social media, with those small snippets, this gets easier to digest. It’s a tool between so many others to make science accessible and help people to understand our complex world. Instead of falling into traps because you don’t have the necessary knowledge.
Last time, I told you about my “mission” in science communication. Using social media for bee science has become an essential part of that. And I can do that for your bee research project, too. Just contact me to know more.
