FREE-B: Studying FREE-living honey Bee colonies in Europe: nature-based solutions to safeguard diversity, ensure resilience, and promote transformative change in beekeeping

The European honeybee, Apis mellifera, is critical for both plant biodiversity preservation and food security by providing reliable, high volume pollination services over large distances and across the entire floral season under a wide range of climatic and environmental conditions.

However, the anthropogenic introduction of several exotic honeybee parasites and predators have decimated the wild honeybee populations, pressurizing the beekeeping sector to preserve honeybee genetic diversity and cover the pollination deficit across European natural and agricultural ecosystems, while battling increasing colony mortality.FREE-B aims to address these issues by: (1) mapping the true status of wild, free-living honeybee colonies (FLCs) across Europe; (2) investigating the factors permitting their long-term survival; (3) translating this new knowledge into improved beekeeping, conservation and crop pollination strategies.FREE-B aims to achieve these objectives through a Citizen Science platform to identify new FLCs (WP1); monitor and sample these FLCs (WP2); analyse the genetic, biological and environmental factors linked to their natural survival (WP3, WP4); test these factors experimentally (WP5); communicate extensively with stakeholders, including beekeepers, land managers and policy makers (WP6) to aid the conservation of a key native pollinator and promote transformative change to the beekeeping sector.

Sweden is involved in all WP, with particular responsibility for WP4.