Collecting and sharing data on bee health: Towards a European Bee Partnership

The European Parliament’s Working Group on Apiculture and Bee Health, chaired by MEP Mariya Gabriel, tasked this year’s scientific conference to come up with a tangible, practical proposal to help bring together information and data from disparate sources with one aim – to halt the decline in bee loss or weakening of honey bee colonies. Our proposal is to work towards setting up a European Bee Partnership to answer that request.

Members of the beekeeping industry, scientists and national and EU bodies across Europe have worked hard over the years to highlight the worrying decline in the number of healthy honey bees and honey bee colonies. Huge amounts of work across Member States have been produced, and data published, showing the multi-faceted issues facing the health of bees, in particular honey bees.

EFSA’s HEALTHY-B opinion provides a framework which can be consulted by stakeholders involved in measuring, analysing and reporting honey bee health in the EU. This framework will contribute to the progress of a wider EFSA mandate, the MUST-B project, on assessing honey bee health taking into account multiple stressors.

Information availability and accessibility are among the big challenges of our time. The complexity of honey bee health risk assessment requires all available information be made accessible and that all efforts are made in a collaborative manner to turn data into real knowledge. In order to keep focus, this scientific meeting will be dedicated to honey bees. The hope is that this initiative can be extended in the future to include other types of bees (e.g. bumblebees and solitary bees).

EFSA’s access to multi-disciplinary expertise, together with its commitment to independence and excellence of science, can be a great advantage in helping steer such a project with multiple stakeholders.

Following a commitment by bee health and other stakeholder groups at this scientific meeting to work towards establishing a European Bee Partnership, EFSA will be ready to facilitate meetings of a discussion group in the year following the event. This discussion group will draft Terms of Reference for the Partnership and its objectives to present to the EU Bee Week High Level Conference in 2018.

Overview of the event

The objective of the colloquium is to engage all relevant stakeholders involved in bee health, including beekeepers, farmers, industry, scientists, risk assessors and managers, citizens, and policy makers to identify the different needs to improve data sharing/management, to further standardise data collection/reporting/storing, and to strengthen collaboration for a more holistic and more robust assessment of bee health in EU.

The event is organised into two plenary (morning and afternoon) and two breakout sessions.

The first plenary in the morning introduces the topic of this scientific colloquium on “Collecting and sharing data on bee health: Towards a European Bee Partnership” from the perspectives of the different representatives involved in bee health at EU level and also provides an overview of colloquia organised during Bee Week activities in previous years.

In the afternoon, the technical aspects of strengthening data sharing and improving data collection quality and efforts in EU will be discussed in two breakout sessions and further discussed in a second plenary when the European Bee Partnership will be presented and discussed.

The first discussion group “Stakeholder collaboration to establish holistic bee health monitoring in the field” is specifically on the identification of stakeholders needs to optimise data sharing in the EU; the second discussion group “Better data collection and access for better bee health risk assessment” focuses on the more technical aspects of data collection/reporting and storing with high quality standard requirements and ultimately on issues related to data management.

The afternoon plenary “European Bee Partnership”, with input from the two breakout discussion groups, provides the opportunity to the relevant stakeholders to develop concrete actions towards increased collaboration.

Feel free to contact us for any content-related matters or organisational and logistical issues at the following address: conferences@efsa.europa.eu.