Inventory of EFSA’s activities on bees

The inventory presented in this report describes the past and current scientific activities of EFSA addressing directly or indirectly bee risk assessment, risk mitigation and monitoring. To perform this work, the Emerging Risks Unit coordinated an internal Task Force including staff from the Pesticides, Animal Health and Welfare, Genetically Modified Organisms, Plant Health, Scientific Assistance Support and Emerging Risks Units and from the Communications Directorate. Up to September 2012, a total of 355 scientific outputs (published/unpublished yet: 344/11), and a number of news stories and a video on bees, were identified from the Pesticides (311/7), Animal Health and Welfare (0/1), Genetically Modified Organisms (29/0) and the Plant Health (2/0) Units and Panels and from the Scientific Assistance Support (2/1) and the Emerging Risks (0/2) Units. However, the majority of these outputs (89.6%) were conclusions on the peer review of pesticide active substances and opinions on applications for the approval of regulated genetically modified products. Among the 355 identified scientific outputs, 14 outputs (0.4%) focused on bees and were predominantly in the areas of pesticide risk assessment and monitoring. In addition, three external scientific activities between EFSA, Anses and OECD on bee issues were identified. The first EFSA scientific outputs on bee issues were published in 2004 and their number has increased progressively over time, but particularly after 2008 (23% published between 2004-2007 and 77% between 2008-2012). The Task Force will use this inventory to conduct a data gap analysis and make further recommendations in terms of research needs and future work at EFSA on bees in a second report.