pan-european assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of stressors on the health of bees

This press release was published by EurekAlert! and AlphaGalileo.  The EU-funded PoshBee project successfully ended in May 2023, delivering a collection of evidence, tools and policy recommendations to support healthy bee populations.Bee species are essential for both human and planetary well-being, but they face many threats causing their decline around the globe. To help reverse this decline, back in 2018, PoshBee set out to provide a holistic understanding of how chemicals...

PoshBee’s Final newsletter has just been released offering a closer look at what PoshBee achieved in its final year and the legacy it leaves behind.  PoshBee's Final newsletter Download the newsletter here! You can also read our previous newsletters

A recent ‘Success story’ published by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation calls attention to PoshBee’s evidence, tools and policy proposals to enhance bee health. PoshBee's Success story Besides celebrating PoshBee’s legacy so close to the project’s ending in May 2023, the story also includes the reflections of the project’s coordinator Mark Brown in terms of how PoshBee supported healthy bee...

In many types of applied and fundamental studies involving honeybees, it is necessary to evaluate the populations of adult bees and brood of various ages, as well as assess quantities of nectar, honey, bee bread and pollen. In order to establish how the structure of the colony changes over time, such assessments may be made repeatedly.  ColEval: Honeybee COLony Structure EVALuation for Field Surveys (Hernandes 2020) is a common method for such assessments where reference photographs...

A new PoshBee research paper explores the impact of landscape heterogeneity, weather and climatic conditions on the abundance of several broad taxonomic groups of flower-visiting insects, in 128 crop-dominated sites across Europe. The paper highlights the importance of understanding the role of taxon-specific responses to changes in land use and climate for the continued delivery of pollination services to pollinator-dependent crops. (A) Location of the 128 sites – oilseed rape...

In order to contribute to an improved bee health capacity, PoshBee members produced 17 training videos demonstrating project research techniques in practice. PoshBee partners from CNRS and BioPark Archamps recently added a new video to the project’s collection presenting the Bottom-Up Mass Spectrometry-Based Proteomics workflow used for bee haemolymph analysis. It aims to identify/quantify proteins, detect impacted biological pathways and discover new markers of exposure to abiotic and...

In order to provide stakeholders with valuable insight into PoshBee's research process and contemporary research techniques, the project has produced 17 training videos. The latest one – created by PoshBee partners from CNRS and BioPark Archamps – presents the MALDI mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) strategy to localise and monitor peptide changes in whole honey bee bodies following an experimental model of exposure to biotic and abiotic stressors....

In order to demonstrate the project’s protocols in practice, PoshBee partners have produced a rich training program containing 17 videos. They cover topics ranging from nectar extraction from bees to pesticide risk assessment experiments on wild bee species. One of the most popular videos from this program – created by PoshBee partners from CNRS and BioPark Archamps – demonstrates the analysis of bee haemolymph samples with MALDI matrix spotting and spectral...

Since 2018, academics, beekeepers and farmers have been joining forces in PoshBee to support healthy bee populations, sustainable beekeeping and pollination across Europe. To provide a concise overview of their main results, PoshBee published a special project Legacy brochure which summarises the key findings of each work package, thus offering a glimpse into what PoshBee achieved in the past five years. PoshBee's Legacy brochure Although there is still a long way to go when it...

Pollinators play a vital role in maintaining biodiversity and agricultural production worldwide, but they are susceptible to various infectious and parasitic agents (IPAs). To better assess the exposure of honey bees to IPAs, researchers have developed discriminative and quantitative molecular methods. These methods produce large datasets that need to be summarised for interpretation. Graphical abstract of the paper. A new PoshBee paper describes the calculation of three types of...

Since its beginning in 2018, PoshBee has been working on transforming its scientific results into practical recommendations. In that spirit, the project has published a total of 16 practice abstracts on the EIP-AGRI platform presenting the practical implications of its results. These concise pieces of information cover the project's full life cycle, from its objectives (presented in practice abstract 1) to its results. In March 2023, to finalise its collection, the project published two new...

During PoshBee’s final meeting in March 2023, project members were surprised with an unexpected outcome from the project’s semi-field experiments. PoshBee partner Robin Dean prepared a gift bag for everyone with goodies made from PoshBee beeswax. The goodies came with some handy instructions on how to use the wax to create a boot waterproofer, a lip balm or a hand cream. PoshBee beeswax and tealights, wrapped in a compostable cellophane bag and a raffia tie. This was...

Pesticides pose a potential threat to bee health, which could be exacerbated when combined with other stressors, such as parasites. Current pesticide risk assessment however evaluates pesticide impact on otherwise healthy bees without accounting for these additional stressors. To understand the specific impacts of pesticides and their interactions with other stressors, a new PoshBee paper tested acute oral doses of three pesticides — glyphosate, Amistar and sulfoxaflor — on the...

On 22 and 23 March 2023, five years after PoshBee’s kick-off meeting in Paris, project partners and stakeholder advisory committee members gathered for a bitter-sweet final meeting in Rome. It is fair to say that after two online annual meetings, partners were more than happy to gather in person and create that PoshBee buzz in the room one final time. PoshBee partners at the final meeting in Rome, Italy. Hosted by project partner Coldiretti, the meeting was officially opened by...

A recent study published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences has developed molecular signatures reflecting the health status of the buff-tailed bumblebee – Bombus terrestris. The study aimed to better understand the impact of environmental stressors on the health of pollinators, so crucial for maintaining biodiversity in ecosystems and agriculture. Omics workflow (seven steps from experimental infection to data processing) applied to Bombus terrestris. The...

The connection between diet and pesticide resistance in bees have recently received attention, both in PoshBee and outside. When experimentally testing pesticide risk to bees, only pollen generalists are used. What about pollen specialist (oligolectic) species? A new PoshBee paper introduces the wallflower mason bee (Osmia brevicornis) as a potential model species to study the effects of pesticides on a bee specialised on the cabbage family, including the common European field crop oilseed...

Weather conditions are an important driver of pollinator activity and with global climate continuing to change, researchers ponder the question of how the changing weather patterns affect the relative contributions and importance of different pollinator groups. To understand what might happen in the future, it is important to first understand how bees respond to current weather conditions. To find out more about this question, a recent study co-funded by PoshBee conducted in Ireland observed...

In the spirit of delivering practice-relevant research outputs, PoshBee issues a stakeholder summary for each published research paper, focusing on the publications’ main outcomes with practical value. To provide stakeholders with a comprehensive overview of the project’s summaries, PoshBee prepared a new "Stakeholder summaries booklet".  The booklet contains PoshBee’s 19 stakeholder summaries produced thus far, 15 of which are available in languages...

In October 2022, Eleanor Attridge (PoshBee partner from the Federation of Beekeepers of Ireland Associations [FIBKA]) won the annual UK National Honey Show essay competition on the topic of "Lifecycle of the Varroa Mite".  Essay by Eleanor Attridge, published in BBKA News. The Varroa mite is the most significant threat to honey bees’ survival, weakening their immune system, which can lead to very high winter losses. Eleanor’s essay discusses its life...

PoshBee’s open access collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal continues to grow, with its latest publication being the project’s Milestone 15 Protocols for semi-field and field experiments. PoshBee study frame. In contrast to the conventional study design where bees are exposed to one stressor or product alone to assess its effects, PoshBee carried out several semi-field and field studies exposing bees to more than one stressor, for example, a fungicide...