Trinity staff will be at the forefront of a €9 million Europe-wide Horizon 2020 project, PoshBee, aimed at protecting the health of bees across the world.
Prof Jane Stout from Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences will lead the creation and implementation of a work package that will see researchers conduct fieldwork in eight European countries. In Ireland, this work will be conducted in collaboration with Teagasc and the Federation of Irish Beekeepers Associations (FIBKA).
The project, called PoshBee (Pan-European Assessment, Monitoring and Mitigation of Stressors on the Health of Bees), is to be led overall by former Trinity zoologist Prof Mark Brown. It will run for five years, aiming to understand the impacts of multiple pressures on a range of bee species and develop new tools to help reduce risks.
The project will have a funding budget of €9 million, and will bring together 42 partners from across Europe to deliver a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor approach to bee health.
In a press statement, Stout said: “Because of worldwide concerns over bee decline, we will be working with farmers and beekeepers across Europe, to establish a baseline of what’s stressing bees in agricultural ecosystems.”
“It’s thought that a combination of pressures, including agrochemicals, disease and loss of floral resources, which provide bees with their nutrition, is contributing to bee decline”, she said.
“We are aiming to quantify this in the field, in order to try to establish exposure hazards, and ultimately develop tools, screening protocols, and practice- and policy-relevant outputs to local, national, European, and global stakeholders.”
