BEEGUARDS

Start date: 1 October 2023

End date: 30 September 2027

Grant agreement ID: 101082073

BeeGuards aims to strengthen the resilience of the European beekeeping sector by providing sustainable management practices, novel husbandry strategies and digital and forecasting tools that enable the sector to adapt to a changing environment. We focus on determining how abiotic factors, such as management practices, climate change, nutrition and resource constraints, drive emerging biotic stressors that threaten colony health and erode the resilience of European beekeeping.

BeeGuards is multi-stakeholder and takes a multi-stakeholder approach from the outset, which has led to an open and inclusive design of the work programme. As a community, we will conduct Europe-wide field studies to evaluate and validate innovative threshold-based management and breeding strategies for resilience, using hives equipped with technological measurement tools. Detailed and complementary immunological, behavioural, microbiological, pathological and ecological research will shed light on the ways in which management and climate act on honey bees and other pollinators. In this way, BeeGuards will, for the first time, provide a truly holistic view of the mechanisms that determine the resilience of beekeeping and implement local solutions for nature-based adaptation, including model-based advisory tools for stakeholders.

Our open and participatory actions include the development of a community website WikiBEEdia where we will share and promote BeeGuards concepts and results, including a Search for sustainable beekeeping practices. Ultimately, BeeGuards will show the way towards the change of perspective needed to achieve resilient beekeeping. BeeGuards will mitigate the environmental impact of beekeeping in terms of impact on wild pollinators and carbon footprint, protect pollinator biodiversity, ensure the future provision of pollination services and support the economic development and inclusion of beekeeping, preparing the European beekeeping sector to face the climate. challenge.

More information here