Scientific results are only relevant, if they are brought to the knowledge of practitioners and applied in the field. In BeeGuards Work Package 9, the knowledge generated in the project will be shared with stakeholders through both traditional methods (scientific articles, articles in beekeeping magazines, field training, leaflets, posters and presentations at workshops and conferences) and social media (including videos, podcasts). While addressing several stakeholders’ categories, the primary target group of BeeGuards are beekeepers, whose education and knowledge on beekeeping is vital for maintaining honey bee health and resilient beekeeping. The project website (www.beeguards.eu) features a blog and interactive elements for users to connect with the project consortium, for example by signing up as citizen scientists or as members of the Multi-Actor-Forum. Beekeepers can participate in the field study of WP1 with their own honey bee colonies and they will be provided with protocols and continuous support from WP 9. The project makes use of a bottom-up approach called the ‘Quest,’ aiming to identify successful beekeeping practices for resilience. We have already started a beekeeper encyclopedia called WikiBEEdia (https://wikibeedia.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page). Resilient practices and generic information on honey bee health and good beekeeping practices are now compiled in the WikiBEEdia. This wiki-like platform, initially moderated by the Consortium’s multidisciplinary expertise and volunteers, is open for anyone to contribute and will continue beyond the project duration. We consider this as part of the legacy of the BeeGuards project, growing even many years after the project finished. WikiBEEdia will include BeeGuards’ results, presented in an accessible format but is also open for other research projects on honey bees. A global community of beekeepers from a variety of climate zones can feed the encyclopedia with their knowledge. 

BeeGuards aims to evaluate the impact of beekeeping on wild pollinators across agricultural landscapes, and develop management strategies to mitigate potential competition. In the dedicated Work Package 8, field studies will be conducted in several European countries and Argentina to assess competition by identifying Plant-Pollinator-Pathogen networks. The abundance, diversity, and reproductive success of native pollinators will be measured in relation to honey bee abundance. Additionally, historical competition will be evaluated through case studies, modelling the response of wild pollinator diversity to local honey bee pressure. The impact of pathogen transmission from honey bees to wild bees, and vice versa, will be studied through laboratory pathogen challenge experiments. These experiments will evaluate impacts on survival, fitness, and symptom expression of key pollinators such as the eusocial bee Bombus terrestris, and the solitary bee Osmia sp.. Moreover, a field-based case study will assess pathogen profiles, and colony development and fitness in bumblebee colonies placed at an isolated honey bee mating station. Finally, informative and simplified technical materials will be developed and shared via the project’s media channels, facilitating citizen science contributions to pollinator assessments and improving knowledge and awareness of beekeepers and wider society on the important ecological role of wild pollinators.

To support beekeeping resilience, BeeGuards aims to create a systematic framework to understand the environmental impact of European beekeeping practices. It will investigate if breeding bees for resilience can lower this environmental impact and compare new and traditional beekeeping methods to determine which practices are best for the environment.

Initially the work will focus on developing a common method for evaluating the environmental impacts of current and innovative beekeeping practices. Through online workshops and material flow analysis, the team will gather data on the resources and processes involved in both traditional and new beekeeping methods. This data will help create scenarios to model the environmental impacts of these practices.

In a second stage we will use Life Cycle Assessment to analyze the environmental impact of beekeeping. This work will include both traditional and innovative beekeeping practices, considering direct and indirect impacts, such as changes in feedstock or honey production.

Several environmental indicators will be assessed, such as Global Warming Potential (GWP), water depletion, and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem quality. These indicators will be chosen based on their practicality and relevance to sustainable beekeeping.

The results will identify best practices for sustainable beekeeping and provide a holistic environmental impact assessment. These findings will be shared widely with beekeepers, offering practical recommendations to reduce their environmental footprint through innovative management practices.

The BeeGuards’ overarching objective is to better understand how climate influences the emergence of pest and pathogen threats, so that beekeeping resilience can be improved by predicting emergence, and developing management tools to mitigate threats. This Work Package benefits from data collected in other projects, and other parts of BeeGuards, to develop our understanding of biological mechanisms using models.  First, we will develop a model that allows us to predict changes in Varroa mite populations in response to climate, honey bee mite resistance traits, and beekeeping management.  We will use existing data on the location of honey bee diseases, and combine them with climate data, to help predict which honey bee diseases might cause problems under future climate change. Second, we are seeing more extreme weather events, and we will gather in-hive sensor data to quantify the impact these events have on honey bee foraging. We will then complete experiments that determine the impact low foraging has on the susceptibility of honey bees to pathogens. Third, we will improve our understanding of where emerging pests like Tropilaelaps mites and Small hive beetle are currently located, and use climate data to estimate their future spread across Europe. We will then run workshops with experts to collate management protocols for emerging pest threats. Finally, by partnering with BeeBreed.eu database, we will work with bee breeders to develop breeding tools that monitor and mitigate emerging diseases in real-time. 

BeeGuards will investigate, in Work Package 5, how nutrition, climate and management practices influence the immunity and resilience of bees in times of climate change. The investigation ranges from field studies in Italy, Croatia and Germany on pollen quality to controlled laboratory experiments in which bees are exposed to different nutrient levels, temperatures and pathogens. A wide range of research methods are applied to study the immune responses of honey bees and wild bee species such as bumble bees and mason bees. More specifically, the studies cover the behavioral, cellular, humoral and molecular levels of immunity, experimenting the AI tools for image recognition to increase measurement accuracy. In field experiments, food quality in the landscape is assessed by pollen analysis, while in controlled laboratory experiments honey bees are fed with different pollen qualities under different temperature and pathogen conditions. Transcriptomic assays and RNAi techniques will shed light on networks of gene modulation influenced by nutritional stress and environmental factors. The Work Package will also investigate the health of male bees (drones), which is often overlooked in research. In addition, we will use observation hives equipped with infrared cameras to investigate the resilience strategies of different honey bee subspecies to acute heat stress. 

Overall, this work package aims to improve our understanding of bee health and adaptation strategies that are crucial for sustainable beekeeping in a changing environment, thereby supporting biodiversity resilience efforts more broadly.

It is well known that a balanced honey bee gut microbiota is crucial for honey bee health. Also honey bee genetics influences colony resilience. Together, the honey bee and its microbiota, form what is called the honey bee holobiont. In this Work Package, we aim to understand how different beekeeping practices and environmental conditions across Europe influence the honeybee holobiont and what are the implications of holobiont modulation for colony resilience. By analyzing the genetic material of the microbes living in the guts of bees, we will create the first comprehensive database of bee gut bacteria in Europe. This database will help identify unknown bacteria that might be important for bee health and will be the baseline for early detection of emerging pathogenic variants in the future. Moreover, with dedicated in-field and laboratory experiments, we will identify holobiont traits that are key for adapting to environmental challenges and ensuring colony survival. The findings will provide new knowledge and data aiming to help beekeepers make informed decisions to improve colony resilience by leveraging the beneficial effects of microbes, ultimately leading to stronger and healthier bee colonies.

Data collection, data organization and curation is the keystone in all research. In this regard, the two objectives of the BeeGuards Work Package 3 team are to i) develop model-derived decision support tools based on data from an integrated pan-European Digital Apiary Network and ii) to collect, organize, and share large volumes of data via the centralized data management platform to enable big science and Artificial Intelligence applications. 

The integrated framework for data management will be developed and supported by Web application to assist the users. The data will come from both the observations and measurements performed by the BeeGuards investigators (WP1) and from the Internet of Apiaries, a digital network of in-hive sensors and scales to support and explain observations, set up in the BeeGuards Innovative Management field study (WP1). This combined approach can generate large volumes of data and the team will use state of the art cloud technologies to store and organize data collected by the consortium, and develop an integrated data deposition and ex-change tool to allow project participants to upload, fetch, and visualize project data. Such an infrastructure will provide the backbone for decision support system development, an activity we intend to demonstrate by implementing two forecasting models, publish them as APIs, and create a graphical demonstrational tool.

These activities will produce not just architectural blueprints and best practices, but also pre-operational tools that will be made available to project participants, stakeholders, and third parties.

The team involved in this Work Package investigates the feasibility of improving genetic progress in honey bee populations through two primary means: (a) the introduction of elements of natural selection, such as the propagation of the fittest genotypes, and (b) the acceleration of the breeding cycle. Additionally, it aims to establish an international network of cryobanks for the preservation of honey bee genetic resources. These strategies will be tested and studied under field conditions, such as performance evaluations at mating stations, with the main objectives being to identify the biological mechanisms involved in resistance, to verify the approaches, and demonstrate their applicability. To support the finding of thethe field studies, molecular analysis and bioinformatic techniques will be applied. Ultimately, the beekeepers and breeders, the primary beneficiaries, will be involved in the verification of the concepts, which will initially be tested in Macedonia, Italy, Poland, and Germany. The goal is to establish novel breeding practices in current and new breeding initiatives, enhancing genetic improvement, resistance, and conservation of indigenous honey bee populations.

The objective of this Work Package is to investigate the effects of an innovative colony management and varroa control concept on performance and resilience of colonies in comparison to the commonly used conventional approach. A common field experiment is being run by 16 institutions across 11 countries, involving close to 500 colonies in total. The conventional approach consists of the treatment most commonly applied by beekeepers in each respective region, whereas the innovative approach is characterized by an induced summer brood interruption followed by the application of oxalic acid in the broodless stage. Mite infestation levels are monitored continuously during the entire season, and treatments during winter are only applied if mite levels exceed the damage threshold. The study will run for two seasons. Data on colony performance and survival will be regularly collected, and samples are taken for further analysis. At the end of the field study, overall performance, health and colony loss data of the two groups will be compared in a comprehensive analysis. 

The study will be complemented by a parallel field study run by beekeepers who compare the two approaches in their own apiaries. Standardized management and test protocols for institutions and beekeepers participating in the field studies are available as guidelines for colony management, varroa treatment, recordkeeping and documentation of results. Our ultimate goal is to provide results that will encourage beekeepers Europe-wide to increasingly adopt innovative varroa management approaches based on summer brood interruption, while at the same time reducing or avoiding winter treatments.

After a competitive two-stage evaluation process, the BeeGuards project was selected as one of two research projects for the “Resilient beekeeping” call funded under the Horizon Europe framework (HORIZON-CL6-2022-BIODIV-02). The BeeGuards consortium, coordinated by Dr Cecilia Costa from the Italian Agricultural research Council (CREA), consists of 27 partners including scientists, beekeepers and beekeeping associations, consulting and technology companies, from 16 countries. The 4-year project starting in October 2023, aims to provide sustainable management practices, novel breeding strategies, and digital and forecasting tools that will allow the beekeeping sector to adapt to a changing environment. In the field, BeeGuards will perform studies in 11 countries in Europe and beyond, applying innovative threshold-based management practices, using hives equipped with digital sensors. This will support the work of beekeepers by providing guidelines for the adaptation of beekeeping practices to present and future challenges. BeeGuards will perform complementary immunological, behavioural, pathological, genomic and ecological studies that will serve to elucidate how management, climate and environment act on honey bees and other pollinators. Beekeepers, farmers and citizens will be involved via a WikiBeedia and by citizen-science and carbon footprint studies to ensure that research findings are directly translated into useful/good practices for end users.