EAS Pollinator Experts Participate in Project ViBee
The pollinator team at EAS Ecotox GmbH, based in Niefern, Germany participated in project ViBee. Focused on bee vitality, the project ran from August 2020 to August 2023*
In the project, digital tools that will benefit both practical beekeeping and the approval of plant protection products in risk assessment were utilised. EAS Ecotox GmbH acted as a non-grant recipient partner and was recruited to act as a direct facilitator, checking if the equipment could fulfil data collection according to the requirements of good laboratory practice (GLP).
In the early stages of the project, existing indicators of bee vitality were reviewed for their practicality and transferred to new technologies. Vitality is understood as the bee’s ability to tolerate stress from diseases or pesticides and to sustain their performance as pollinators and honey producers. The vitality indicators to be developed will allow the vitality of bee colonies to be measured and assessed in an automated way.
Such vitality indicators (VIs) will be used by beekeepers to detect disturbances of vitality at an early stage, to understand their causes, and to take appropriate countermeasures. Testing institutes can use the VIs with the appropriate tools to increase the accuracy and efficiency of field trials. Regulatory agencies can incorporate VIs in the formulation of their protection goals, risk assessments, and compensatory measures. By providing a concrete landscape reference, different cropping methods can be evaluated from the perspective of bee vitality and pollination performance. Digital tools include an electronic counter of a colony’s flight activity (BeeCheck), automatic hive scales (tested in the TrachtNet monitoring program), and user-friendly software (VI-SOFT) that supports the derivation of appropriate beekeeping practices.
To ensure that BeeCheck and the indicators that can be measured with it are used in practice, an independent testing institute kept an eye on practicality and plan to develop innovative services based on these indicators. Another research partner carried out the statistical evaluation of these services and supported them with its own trials. In addition, this partner advanced the use of the BEEHAVE simulation model in the context of risk assessment of plant protection products with a case study, and used the data collected with BeeCheck for this purpose. The specialist institutes FBI and IBI are developing beekeeper-oriented usage protocols to transfer the knowledge gained with BeeCheck to widely used hive scales.
Please contact us with any questions on the ViBee project!
*Modified from original content published with permission from https://vibee-project.net/
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