Project description
Promoting sustainable beekeeping practices
Beekeeping (or apiculture), like any other agricultural activity, is susceptible to factors such as climate change, nutrition, resource limitations and management practices. The EU-funded BeeGuards project aims to strengthen the beekeeping community’s resilience and promote sustainable practices. The project will establish and validate threshold management and breeding strategies by conducting studies on hives equipped with digital monitoring tools. In each case, BeeGuards will consider solutions that are eco-friendly and reflect local conditions, while minimising any impact on species of natural pollinators. Project results, including advice and best practice models, will be made available to stakeholders on digital platforms.
Objective
BeeGuards aims to strengthen the resilience of the European beekeeping sector by providing sustainable management practices, novel breeding strategies and digital and forecasting tools that allow the sector to adapt to a changing environment. We focus on determining how abiotic factors such as management practices, climate change, nutrition and resource limitations drive emerging biotic stressors that threaten colony health and erode the resilience of European beekeeping.
BeeGuards comprises multiple actors and adopts a multi-actor approach from inception which has led to an open and inclusive design of the work programme. As a community, we will perform European-wide field studies evaluating and validating innovative threshold-based management and breeding strategies for resilience, using hives equipped with technological measurement tools. Complementary detailed immunological, behavioural, microbiological, pathological, ecological investigations will elucidate 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 determining beekeeping resilience and implement nature-based, local solutions for adaption, including model-based advisory tools for stakeholders.
Our open and participatory actions include development of a WikiBEEdia community website where we will share and promote the BeeGuards concepts and results, including a Quest for sustainable beekeeping practices. Ultimately, BeeGuards will show the way for a change of perspective that is needed to achieve resilient beekeeping. BeeGuards will mitigate the environmental impact of beekeeping in terms of impact on wild pollinators and of carbon footprint, protect pollinator biodiversity, ensure the future provision of pollination services and support the economic development and inclusiveness of beekeeping, preparing the European apicultural sector to meet the climate challenge.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesnutrition
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy scienceapiculture
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
00184 Roma
Italy
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Participants (25)
00186 Roma
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50250 Bet Dagan
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9890 Gavere
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00185 Roma
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12277 BERLIN
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
4180 Soro
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
8483 Deutsch Goritz
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11145 Athina
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31000 Osijek
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96-100 SKIERNIEWICE
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1000 Ljubljana
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16540 Hohen Neuendorf
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65189 Wiesbaden
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1000 LJUBLJANA
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750 07 Uppsala
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8300 Neuquen
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1000 Skopje
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2080 L-Imsida
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118 55 ATHINA
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8010 Graz
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48940 Leioa
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38121 Trento
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
50009 Zaragoza
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Partners (1)
Partner organisations contribute to the implementation of the action, but do not sign the Grant Agreement.
NE1 7RU Newcastle Upon Tyne
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