Bee health: new data hub goes live

The EU Bee Partnership (EUBP) has unveiled a new online data platform that will play a crucial role in efforts to protect bee and pollinator health. The platform is a ground-breaking tool that will bring together and visualise harmonised data related to bees and other pollinators.

Stakeholders from different sectors – beekeeping and farming associations, European agencies, scientists and academia, the crop protection industry, veterinary associations, NGOs, and others –  have collaborated closely to develop the platform. BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination led the development of the prototype platform, supported by a grant from EFSA.

The collection of harmonised data on bees and pollinators from across Europe will be central to the success of the new framework developed by EFSA for environmental risk assessment of multiple stressors in bees known as MUST-B.

EFSA will assist the transformation of the prototype platform into a fully operational tool by providing finance for the next phase of its development. A call for tenders will soon be launched to take the project forward.

The ultimate goal is for the platform to become a hub that brings together all relevant information, knowledge and data collected by, and exchanged among, stakeholders on bee health and beekeeping. It would make relevant data accessible to end users such as beekeepers, beekeeping or farming associations, researchers, agencies and policymakers.

EFSA has also just taken delivery of field data collected from sentinel honey bee hives in Denmark and Portugal. These pilot collections will help to calibrate the ApisRAM simulation model that is at the heart of the MUST-B framework.