Today was the last online Plenary Meeting for the core INSIGNIA-EU consortium before we meet in person in just over two weeks in Bragança, Portugal, courtesy of Alice Pinto and her colleagues at the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança. The laboratories in Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain have been working flat out over the winter to analyse the thousands of samples collected by the citizen scientist beekeepers in all 27 EU countries during the 2023 beekeeping season. Results of many of the matrices are now complete, and have been handed over to the consortium’s statisticians and modellers for further analysis. The group were here looking at some of the results for pollen composition, which show the proportion of different pollen types over the season in different apiaries, but they would not look out of place on the walls of an art gallery! In the near future some of the results will be passed to the National Coordinators in each country for distribution to the individual beekeepers. The aim of the Bragança meeting will be to review all of the results of the project ahead of a meeting with the European Commission in Brussels in April.
PREPARATORY ACTION FOR MONITORING OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION USING HONEY BEES