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At the IPB (Instituto Politécnico de Bragança in Portugal), the botanical origin of the Insignia pollen is determined molecularly. The botanic origin of pollen is determined by its DNA.

As all living organisms, all plants have DNA, and all plant DNA has an ITS2 (internal transcribed spacer) fragment. This ITS2 fragment is a specific part of the DNA strand and is unique for a plant family/ genus/ species. Of every pollen grain in the homogenised subsamples collected from a pollen trap, beebread and Beehold tube, the Insignia pollen matrices, the ITS2 fragment is isolated and multiplicated to millions of copies by an in vitro reaction called PCR.
Continue reading “Metabarcoding of pollen”

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.

 

 

In Insignia we are “Monitoring pesticides and pollen diversity via honeybees” – that is the claim on the starting page of this website. But how can one do that, and what are the advantages to do that with citizen scientists? Continue reading “How to study pollen diversity with citizen scientists?”

The colonies in Denmark have been treated for varroa mites, the main killer of honey bee colonies. We know we did treat well during the season with organic treatments. We finished feeding and the bees have slowly started to have what we call “loose” winter cluster. On sunny days with the sun on the bee boxes, the bees do fly out and we even see them collect pollen during those warmer days. The colonies look very fine and strong and we expect them to come into the new season well. Continue reading “Great to have a car”

Every 2 years the Bee Protection group of the International Commission for Plant-Pollinator Relationships (ICPPR) organises a congress about the hazard of pesticides to bees. Bee researchers from academia, contract labs, industry, governmental institutions, EFSA, organisations involved in bee protection and conservation and student meet there to present and discuss new developments and draft methods and outcomes in assessing the hazard of pesticides to bees both for first to higher tier studies, current hazard assessments are evaluated and new guidelines are presented. This Bee Protection group is both stakeholders of the Insignia pilot study and a target international body to present Insignia. There was a lot of interest in our study, particularly for the non-biological passive samplers. It took some effort to explain the role of the honeybee colony in this study, being not the major subject but the data collecting tool. Contact is made with similar monitoring studies, working groups and EFSA for cooperation and data exchange. Both cooperation and data exchanges are subject currently discussed with the EC-DG SANTE and the consortium. It has shown the need for data of pesticide residues in the environment and the role of the honeybee-colony-tool fulfill in this hot topic.

Sjef van der Steen
coordinator Insignia

 

Sunday morning spent in the lab preparing the last Greek INSIGNIA samples!

Do we really work for the sake of SCIENCE? Are we science-holics? It is really  important to have an answer to pacify my mind! All Sunday morning spent in the lab preparing the samples, in order to have them ready for shipping Monday morning to analytical laboratories. And this is not the only thing, crazy scientists do! We also travel very far (900 km in one day) during the weekend, because there is no other time available, to meet the Citizen Scientists and collect the samples in dry ice (!), transferring the samples next day to the lab (Sunday of course)! And, hello !, the next morning (Monday of course) the financial officer tells you that you are not eligible for reimbursement of your travel expenses because it was a WEEKEND! If I’m not in love with science, what then???

But the story has another dimension! The citizen scientist’s products! The samples! I want to remember only the ones really making a great effort to collect as many samples as possible, write the correct information on the labels, pack them properly and all together in one bag per DATE of COLLECTION! Like in the pictures attached! With such a perfect collaboration, yes, I can spent my weekends travelling and in the lab! Thank you NA, GS and PA for all the good work!

Hope to work with you next year as well! Now lets wait to see the analysis results to understand what is happening out there!

Fani Hatjina,
National Coordinator for Greece

Monitoring for pesticides through different matrixes in a honey bee colony is a sensible way to see what kind and quantities of pesticides are used in the field and eventually end up in the honey bee colony.

From the other side, monitoring the development of the colony and the bees behaviour is a way also to see the effects of the pesticides. Remote monitoring and precision apiculture is very much in ‘fashion’ these days. Temperature, humidity and colony weight are the most common features in a remote censoring, vibrations and sounds are getting in to the game as well, more and more.

Here is a remote monitoring system for temperature, humidity and sounds, could they tell us something about bees’ reaction to the pesticides entering the colony?

Still to be determined!

Fani Hatjina

Belgium is one of the countries in which nine apiaries will be selected for the 2020 trials. The Flemish beekeepers were informed about the Insignia project in October 2019. Beekeeping in Flanders is much more developed than the front page of the magazine suggests. It is a giant step from making straw skeps to applying honeybee colonies as a monitoring tool for pesticides. An application of the honeybee, completely non-existing when the straw skeps were developed some centuries ago. The big difference between beekeeping with the skep and the Insignia study is that bees in the skep were killed to harvest the honey and that the Insignia project aims to result in a  non-invasive (= no bees sampled and killed) citizen scientist sampling protocol; a progress in bee- welfare and bee research.

Denmark. Actually, we already did 2 weeks ago. We did sample in 4 apiaries this season. It became 10 samplings. Between the lines some had 11 sampling, and even more between the line in one Danish apiary we continue to sample 13 times, just to have that number in our records. It has been very exciting to belong to one of the 4 pilot countries in this project. Samples were taken every 2th week very regular during the season. In total this gave 604 samples of pollen, beeholdtubes, apistrips, beebread and a single time honey sample as well.

Continue reading “Time to clean up!”

How easy can science be on your own, no protests, no objections, bright ideas and always being right? However that’s not science, that is vanity.

Science can only blossom and flourish in cooperation and respectful communication with each other. That is why the GoTo Telemeetings occupy a prominent place in the Insignia consortium. The course of the pilot study, new ideas, results clarification and evaluations and any issue of whatever importance are discussed in these meetings. First in small groups of specialists in the consortium to be broadened up with more subjects-involved participants in the course of the subject.
Continue reading “Science with communication”