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.

A key to healthy beekeeping is the Health Status Index (HIS) inspired by EFSA’s Healthy-B toolbox which we will make fully operational, with the active collaboration of beekeepers, by facilitating the coordinated and harmonised flow of data from various sources and by testing and validating each component thoroughly. We envisage a step-by-step expansion of participating apiaries, and will eventually cover all EU biogeographic regions. The key to a sustainable beekeeping is a better understanding of its socio-economics, particularly within local value chains, its relationship with bee health and the human-ecosystem equilibrium of the beekeeping sector and to implement these insights into the data processing and decision making. We will fully integrate socio-economic analyses, identify viable business models tailored to different contexts for European beekeeping and determine the carrying capacity of the landscape. In close cooperation with the EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide bee health and management data platform and affiliated project website will be created to enable sharing of knowledge and learning between scientists and stakeholders within and outside the consortium. We will utilise and further expand the classification of the open source IT-application for digital beekeeping, BEEP, to streamline the flow of data related to beekeeping management, the beehive and its environment (landscape, agricultural practices, weather and climate) from various sources. The dynamic bee health and management data platform will allow us to identify correlative relationships among factors impacting the HSI, assess the risk of emerging pests and predators, and enable beekeepers to develop adaptive management strategies that account for local and EU-wide issues. Reinforcing and establishing, where necessary, new multi-actor networks of collaboration will engender a lasting learning and innovation system to ensure social-ecological resilient and sustainable beekeeping.