T-shirt born on the backseat!

Born on the backseat!

After an exciting and successful annual meeting in Almeria a small group went to Granada to have a look on this very beautiful and historical city. Especially the historic Alhambra is very recommendable. We continued to evaluate our meeting. And suddenly one said: “We should make a citizen’s science t-shirt”. “Yeah, we want a t-shirt”. A t-shirt to show we are a team and a t-shirt to promote INSIGNIA and even maybe a t-shirt for our citizens science apiculturist.

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Keeping the Nordic Baltic countries updated


At the end of January 2020, the annual Nordic-Baltic Apicultural research symposium took place in Oslo, Norway. It is a special meeting, where beekeeping organization people, extensionist and scientist from the Nordic Baltic countries meet to update each other and to create common projects. INSIGNIA made a presentation on the INSIGNIA project, explaining the background and the aim and perspectives of INSIGINA. The very first results from the Danish apiaries were presented. Very exciting results and very good response the audience. Especially presenting the citizen science set up for 2020 showing a simpler setup and easier than in 2019. Several countries express the hope that the project will continue after the pilot project will finish and are ready to join as well if possibly. Conclusion, the project is well received and accepted by society.

INSIGNIA project meeting in Almeria

More than 20 INSIGNIA researchers from ten countries recently held a successful meeting at the University of Almeria, Spain to discuss the progress of the Insignia project. Full discussions took place on the results, experiences and lessons learned from 2019 when sampling took place in Austria, Denmark, Greece and the UK. The citizen science programme for 2020 has now been planned, and will be expanded to nine countries, introducing sampling in Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and Latvia. An opportunity was taken to visit the EU Reference Laboratory for pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables at the University of Almeria, where many of the analyses for INSIGNIA are taking place. Our grateful thanks go to Amadeo Fernandez-Alba and his team for the excellent organisation and hospitality during our stay in Spain.

Christmas Varroa treatment again

It is important to understand the influence of the parasitic varroa mites that we have in nearly all colonies all over Europe.

INSIGNIA uses the honeybees as bioindicators of our surroundings, of the environment. We want to understand what is going on in our environment, about the pollution, the farmers spraying, etc. But then we also need to understand the beekeepers. What are they doing in the colonies ? They need to treat against the varroa mites, otherwise the colonies will die within a few years.

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Pollen as food

Bees pollen is a very important part of the INSIGNIA project. It is collected by the bees as a pallets of pollen made by bees when they land on a flower. It’s a mixture of pollen, saliva, and nectar. It is the very advanced way of the sexual life of the flower plants. The bees bring it from flower to flower. Pollinating. The honeybees are rewarded with nectar and pollen. Pollen is a very important part of the honeybee’s diet as proteins. But for humans it is very interesting as well. One tablespoon of pollen contains  approximately 16 calories 0.3 grams of fat, 1.2 grams of protein, 2.2 grams of carbohydrates, 250 types of nutrients, including vitamins and flavonoids. The last is very interesting. Humans are using it as api-nutrition, means nutrition from the bees’ products. You could say food-supplement. Pollen is also used in the Apitherapy.
Below we show how humans are using pollen in food as the finest and healthy spices you can imaging.

Mixed into homemade chocolate

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Follow your scientist – The INSIGNIA project

Last week note nr 2. “Follow your scientist – the INSIGNIA project”  by Flemming Vejsnæs was sent out to the stakeholders. it draws the attention to our social media and website to inform and to enhance the cooperation and commitment of the stakeholders to the INSIGNIA project. Soon similar notes will be sent to the beekeeper’s journals in the INSIGNIA countries. More notes will follow

Flemming Vejsnæs,  Sjef van der Steen 

 

Our social media
our website

Like a crime scene!

Now the laboratories are working. Hard working. Analyzing all our samples. And is a lot. And they do an amazing job. They analyze, the give results, they question if that and that substance really is to find in the vicinity of the colonies. We give our best answers. They go back, re-analyze and do it even in another laboratory to exclude mistakes. They are very accurate and careful. They came back, telling that the findings are confirmed. We discus, we wonder, we get surprised and we get very excited on this project. It is like a crime case, where now the forensics are working. And they ask for new samples, to conform a suspicion.

This happens today. They wanted to validate or invalidate some findings. They want to be total sure. So, they asked for honey samples and control samples. So, we did. And nice to visit the colonies, confirming if they are alive. And they are and they look good. But for sure now they are in the wintercluster, so we do not want to disturb them to most and stress them. So, we opened the colonies, gentle and took out a frame with feed, scaping a sampling.

All this for the forensics, to confirm the hypothesis.

This project is so exciting and will bring a lot of new results to the surface.

Flemming Vejsnæs

Sample analysis – Greek Lab BPI

After samples’ arrival, they are all coded and then analysed or stored in the freezer till the day of analysis. For their preparation, extraction and clean-up steps are taking place, to separate the analytes from interfering compounds and obtain the optimum results. For the quantification of the pesticide residues analysed, both liquid and gas chromatography combined with tandem mass spectrometry is used. The last stage of this procedure is the data analysis and the evaluation of the results.

Lab material and equipment used by the lab staff (us), are presented in the following pictures. In particular, in the picture on the left, 50mL falcons containing salts for the clean-up step of the samples and 15mL falcons containing samples after the clean-up step are shown in the back and front part of the picture, respectively. Vials to be filled and vials ready for injection in LC-MS/MS and GC-MS/MS are also presented in the following pictures.

Effrosyni Zafeiraki

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