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.

The B-THENET Thematic Network implements a multi actor (MA) approach to modernize the EU beekeeping sector, sharing knowledge that is ready to be put into practice, while fostering innovation and digitalization. Beekeepers will be advanced toward more economically viable and sustainable beekeeping through the knowledge sharing and training of useful and applicable best practices. Our MA approach engages the entire apiculture sector (beekeepers, advisors, researchers, policymakers, industry, consumers, etc.) to collect, categorize and help select best practices and applicable research findings not sufficiently known, using a bottom-up methodology that populates two accessible platforms (“Practices” and “R&I”). Only practices that meet beekeepers’ needs, are effective and ready to use, will be selected, shared and customized in our public platform (“Exchange”) and in national sub-networks (13 National Centres), so we can take into account the differences between territories, and adapt practices to specific regions, languages, equipment, bee genetics, diseases, and the operational scale of beekeeping. This approach will support the setting-up of tailored and validated best practices. A sociological study will map out the channels most consulted by beekeepers to maximise the dissemination of practices in a specific, long-term platform (“Repository”), which is set up to share best practices in appealing, easy to understand, audio-visual materials, translated into 15 EU languages. The flow of practical information will be supported by the 13 National Centres, 3 International Centres and by the targeted events (312 national and 6 international), 1 EU manual on best practices, and 1 set of guidelines for advisors in beekeeping, thus contributing to a rapid cross-fertilization process and to a greater acceptance of the final outputs.