Author: Kristina Gratzer

Today, the Austrian beekeepers, the national coordinators and the study coordinator met virtually to get to know each other and to see how everybody looks like. Jozef van der Steen gave a short presentation to explain the main objectives of INSIGNIA and to present last year’s pesticides and pollen results.

Austrian citizen scientists were very interested and some open questions could be answered by the NatCos Robert Brodschneider and Kristina Gratzer as well as by Jozef van der Steen, who by the way. speaks extraordinary good German.

Today, also the first sampling period started. Within the next four days the APIStrips will be exchanged and pollen will be sampled in nine European countries simultaneously.

Kristina Gratzer

The participating citizen scientists in Austria were very curious about their results from INSIGNIA year 1. As we were curious too, we attempted to provide the results of the metabarcoding and pesticides analyses as quick as possible to them – right after receiving the raw data from the labs and after submitting them to the EU. Further, it was also important to us, to ensure anonymity for the participants. Therefore, each citizen scientist only got his/her individual results.

We decided to not only send out the raw data files, as they are rather difficult to interpret for non-scientists. Instead we performed individual and basic data analysis for all of the 5 participants of year 1 and we arranged them in an excel file with several tables.

The main page (see figure below) explains some basics of how to handle the document and links to all of the result-tables.

 

Kristina Gratzer

The study start for INSIGNIA 2020 is one month away, but we already shipped the tool boxes to the nine Austrian citizen scientists. The tool boxes include the majority of the materials needed for the INSIGNIA 2020 study. The materials are sufficient for 2 bee hives, 1 installation round (=study start) and 10 sampling rounds. The pictures below show the content.

Continue reading “Tool boxes 2020”

Accompanying the scheme for the study set up, we also worked on an illustration for the detailed sampling scheme.  The scheme will also be translated and send to the citizen scientists. Within the scheme, one sampling period of each sampling method is illustrated and the crucial steps are shown. Additionally, the phenology list with 30 plants identified to be very important bee plants across Europe and the sampling dates are shown.

 

Kristina Gratzer

Within year one of INSIGNIA, the ApiStrips were proven to be an excellent pesticide-sampling matrix. Therefore they will also be used in year two of the study.

As there is always room for improvement, the pesticides experts from the University of Almeria developed a new packaging for the strips. From now on, the strips will be wrapped in aluminum foil prior to pack them in a special plastic envelope. The citizen scientist has to remove the yellow strip  and close the envelope like a letter-the envelope is tightly sealed. With this way, the contamination risk decreases and analyses will be improved. Furthermore, the strips are thinner than last year.

 

Kristina Gratzer and Maria Murcia Morales

To facilitate the understanding of our study design, we created an illustration describing the crucial points of the INSIGNIA 2020 study. The scheme will be translated into a total of 7 other languages and will be send to the participating citizen scientists.

 

Kristina Gratzer

Austria finalized the labeling of sample bags, prepared the sample schemes and is currently working on packing the tool boxes for the citizen scientists. Next week, all nine tool boxes will be send to the participants.

 

Kristina Gratzer

Among other EU countries, Austria will also participate in next year’s INSIGNIA ring-testing. Therefore, we are looking for suitable citizen scientists to accompany us through this process. For this purpose, and to introduce the INSIGNIA project to Austria’s beekeepers, we published an article in “Bienenaktuell”-Austria’s biggest beekeeping magazine. We presented our main project goals and the tested active and passive sampling matrices to the readers and draw attention on Austria’s role in the INSIGNIA project in 2019 and the upcoming year 2020.

Brodschneider & Gratzer (2019) INSIGNIA – Ein EU gefördertes Projekt zur Untersuchung von Pollendiversität und Pestizidrückständen. Bienenaktuell Dezember 2019, 13-15.

 

 

The INSIGNIA study aims to be applied science with impact. The prerequisite of impact is sharing knowledge with stakeholders. The INSIGNIA stakeholders are on one hand the European beekeepers and on the other hand the beekeepers’ organizations and the lobby/pressure groups on bees-bees welfare-pesticide-environmental-interaction-pollination-conservation. The latter stakeholders are informed by regular notes about the achievements and progress we are making in the INSIGNIA pilot study. The beekeepers will be informed via the European beekeepers’ magazines.

Today the first note to the beekeepers’ organizations and lobby/pressure groups have been sent. The notes to the beekeepers magazines will follow soon.

Sjef van der Steen

All samples collected by our citizen scientists have to go through the hands of each country’s national coordinator prior to shipping them to the corresponding labs in Greece, Spain and Portugal. The national coordinator checks the information on the sample bags (sample ID, the sample date and the bee colony from which the sample stems from) and compares it to our backup system (LimeSurvey answers). Afterwards, the sample processing takes place as it was described in a previous post: https://www.insignia-bee.eu/samples-in-the-laboratory/#more-599

Kristina Gratzer