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

The SFE2-GfÖ-EEF joint meeting took place in Metz, France, between 21-25 November 2022. Held under the slogan "Ecology and Evolution: New perspectives and societal challenges", the meeting hosted cutting-edge researchers, science policymakers, and leading academics from all over the map. Among them were PoshBee researchers who took the opportunity to present their latest results. Dimitry Wintermantel et al. 2022. Inconsistent negative impacts of azoxystrobin-based...

It has been over 4 years since the European Commission adopted the EU Pollinators Initiative –  the first-ever initiative on wild pollinators. In it, the EU set out strategic objectives and specific actions that Member States have to take in order to address pollinator decline. To ensure the Initiative’s effectiveness, the European Commission is committed to thoroughly reviewing the progress in its implementation and where needed revising the action. As part of this...

Glyphosate is among the most used pesticides in the world and has been identified as one of the pesticides of greatest concern in terms of sublethal effects on bees (Tosi, Sfeir, Carnesecchi, VanEngelsdorp & Chauzat, 2022). In light of that, a new PoshBee study was specifically interested in advancing the assessment of beebread’s contamination with residues of glyphosate, since beebreads represent a possible source of long-term exposure of bees to glyphosate and only a few studies on...

Job opportunity in PoshBee: Pre- or postdoctoral researcher! The position is offered by the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology, Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. Research topic: Effects of pesticides and other stressors on beesConditions: TV-L 13 50-100%, 5 monthsStarting date: 1 January 2023 Requirements MSc in ecology, biology, environmental science, entomology or a related field Data analysis skills in...

Pathogens and parasites, and their associated diseases, are among the major stressors affecting bee health and consequently pollinator decline. The unicellular eukaryote Nosema microsporidia (Nosematidae) are among some of the widespread parasites of managed and wild bees. Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae have been described in honey bees and Nosema bombi in bumble bees. And although there are molecular methods which serve as a complement to microscopic diagnosis of nosemosis, to date, there...

The 9th European Congress of Apidology (EurBee 9) – convened under the motto "Save the bees for our future" – took place in Belgrade, Serbia, in September 2022. This international event was not only an opportunity for interesting scientific contributions and collaborative meetings, but also a chance for scientists and bee experts from around the world to meet in person. Among the oral and poster presentations delivered at EurBee 9, you could spot many familiar PoshBee...

On 10 October, the European Research Executive Agency (REA) held a workshop to discuss the current state of play on pollinators. The goal was to identify key knowledge gaps and their potential solutions resulting from EU-funded projects supporting pollinators. Following a welcome by Paul Webb from the REA, discussions began on what have EU’s multinational research projects learnt and what are the most important next steps in terms of research and policy. Participants had the...

Different types of pesticides are used worldwide and, one way or another, bees get exposed to them. The evidence that such exposure is among the threats bees face is piling up and there are calls for their increased scrutiny in regulatory assessments. However, one significant concern is that existing frameworks could be biased towards assessing risks to the honey bee. In this context, PoshBee researchers considered it vital to test if all bees in fact respond to pesticides in the same manner,...

Documenting complex models has been a long-standing problem, with currently applied methods often lacking the opportunity for reviewers to flag issues or suggest redesigns before the analysis is complete. The Formal Model, introduced recently in the open access journal Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ), aims to improve this process by providing a reproducible formal approach to model documentation, which allows reviewers to identify problems early on. Additionally, it...

The PoshBee project has a new addition to its collection of scientific publications – "A deeper understanding of system interactions can explain contradictory field results on pesticide impact on honey bees", published last week in the journal Nature Communications. The health of honey bees as influenced by multiple factors and their effects. The impacts of pesticides – particularly neonicotinoid insecticides – on pollinators have caused widespread concern,...

In March 2022, PoshBee issued four new practice abstracts discussing assessment endpoints of honey bees’ health, new bee health tools, effects of pollen nutrition and results of semi-field studies. Since then, project partners have been busy adapting their new results to the needs of practitioners – and six months later, PoshBee is back with six new practice abstracts! With these new additions, the project now has a total of 14 practice abstracts available on the EIP-Agri Platform....

A new PoshBee paper describes the development process, rationale, and lessons learned from a wide transdisciplinary investigation into farmland pollinators, conducted within the project’s framework. Distribution of apple and oilseed rape locations that formed the PoshBee site network, with eight sites of each crop in each of the eight participating countries. Note clustering of crops in some of the countries, and proximity of German apple sites to Swiss field sites....

A recently-published PoshBee study assessed the impact of crop exposure and agricultural intensification on the phenotypic variation of bees. Understanding how such environmental stressors impact phenotypic variations is especially relevant in light of the current rapid global change. Insect wings represent an accurate means to assess phenotypic variation because they are flat, two-dimensional and present many homologous landmarks. Furthermore, several studies show that stressful conditions,...

PoshBee is happy to present its latest social media campaign sharing PoshBee’s training videos. These videos transform PoshBee’s work from words to action in order to demonstrate project research in practice, improve bee health capacity and facilitate knowledge transfer. Discover all twelve PoshBee training videos by searching for the hashtag "PoshBeeVideos" on Twitter. PoshBee training videos poster Watch PoshBee’s training

Declines in insect pollinators’ abundance and diversity are evidenced globally and should be addressed not only due to ethical reasons, but also because there are clear benefits from maintaining and enhancing pollinator diversity. For example, although managed bees generally play the major role in the pollination of commercial crops, wild pollinators also provide important crop pollination services. It is hence crucial to inspire the development of management and policy guidelines for the...

On 28 July 2022, PoshBee published one of its key exploitable results to the Horizon Results Platform. Its publication supports the project’s goal to turn scientific research into innovations that can address our societal, economic and environmental challenges. Horizon Results Platform The Horizon Results Platform (HRP), whose motto is "Making results matter", is the place where you can discover the abundance of EU-funded research results and you can get in contact...

On 18 July, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) launched a public consultation on their Revised guidance on the risk assessment of plant protection products on bees (Apis mellifera, Bombus spp. and solitary bees). This consultation comes as a response to a request from the European Commission for the Authority to review its guidance document from 2013 by considering the new scientific knowledge that has emerged. Thus, EFSA launched a public consultation in order to safeguard all...

In January 2022, the PoshBee project committed to providing stakeholder summaries for all high-impact original research and meta analyses. Seven months later, the project has already published 13 such summaries, 11 of which are available in languages other than English (French, Italian, German, etc.). Find out more about PoshBee’s stakeholder summaries below. Pollen nutrition fosters honeybee tolerance to pesticides (in English and French) PoshBee’s first summary answers...

On 22 June 2022, the EU Commission adopted groundbreaking proposals dedicated to protecting and restoring nature. In the context of continuous biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, the EC concluded that more decisive action is needed to achieve the EU climate and biodiversity objectives for 2030 and for 2050. Proposal for Nature Restoration Law For years, the EU has been working towards protecting and restoring nature on many fronts with strategies such as the European Green...

Bees are a highly diverse group of pollinating insects with many species, exhibiting differences in traits such as body size, social behaviour, foraging strategies or floral choices. And while it is well-known bee species vary in such traits, there is still little information on how they vary in their nutritional requirements. Bumblebee on a flower. To address this knowledge gap, PoshBee researchers from UMONS, INRAE & CREA, developed original laboratory experiments,...