Bees on a flower. Photo credit: Michael Hodgins.

PoshBee’s long-term objective is to support sustainable beekeeping and healthy bee populations, including wild bees. One of the aspects leading to this objective is the successful communication, knowledge transfer and dissemination of the project updates and results. As part of the promotional and dissemination toolset of the project selected to make the results of PoshBee available across stakeholders and the general public, the first batch of practice abstracts was prepared and published on the EIP-AGRI platform. These concise and clear pieces of knowledge aim to present PoshBee results to one of the key project target groups – the practitioners.

The first abstracts

As of now, three practice abstracts have been published. 

Prepared by Mark Brown of Royal Holloway, University of London, the first abstract provides a summary of the project goals. These include:

• drafting of the first comprehensive pan-European assessment of the exposure hazard of chemicals and their mixtures for solitary, bumble, and honey bees

• effect of chemicals, their mixtures, and interactions with pathogens and nutrition on bee health

• development of a new model species for testing chemicals in bees and of a dynamic landscape environmental risk assessment models for bees, as well as the production of new molecular markers for assessing bee health and enabling long-term monitoring schemes

• delivering of practice- and policy-relevant research outputs to local, national, European, and global stakeholders

The second abstract, drafted by Simon Hodge and Jane Stout of the Trinity College in Dublin, lists recommendations for groups planning to perform similar multi-partner, farm-scale, field studies on pollinating insects. These groups consist of:

• scientists, who record the appropriate data and ensure all methodological protocols are understood

• beekeepers, who standardize study hives in terms of equipment, colony size, etc., while requesting clear guidelines and maintaining contact with project management

• farmers, who assist researchers throughout the study and maintain appropriate, easily accessible records

The third practice abstract, written by Joachim Rodrigues De Miranda and Maj Rundlöf, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, introduces a study, which investigates the effect of real-world clothianidin exposure on bees across oilseed rape fields in southern Sweden. The results indicate that while honeybee colony growth and development was not affected by clothianidin exposure, both bumblebees and mason bees produced far fewer offspring at fields sown with clothianidin-treated oilseed rape seed than at untreated fields. This leads to the conclusion that honeybee colonies are relatively robust to neonicotinoid exposure in agricultural landscapes, but that bumblebees and solitary bees are strongly affected.

More to come

These three practice abstracts mark the beginning of a dedicated PoshBee collection on the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) platform, which strives to foster competitive and sustainable farming and forestry that 'achieves more and better from less'. Furthermore, this summary of information can also be adopted into practice. PoshBee will continue to submit practice abstracts to translate important project research and results for the needs of practitioners.