Save the bees!

17 member states in the European Union has participated in a 2 year survey called EPILOBEE during 2013 and 2014, in order to obtain data on the worrying rate of the honeybee mortality leading up to those years.
The surveillance program aimed to capture beekeeping practices and record the main honeybee diseases over the winter, especially.

References
JACQUES Antoine, LAURENT Marion, RIBIERE-CHABERT Magali, SAUSSAC Mathilde, BOUGEARD Stéphanie, HENDRIKX Pascal, & CHAUZAT Marie-Pierre. (2016). Honey bee Seasonal mortality 2012-2014 - Epilobee analysis [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.269636
Statistical analysis on the EPILOBEE dataset: explanatory variables related to honeybee colony mortality in EU during a 2 year survey https://doi.org/10.2903/sp.efsa.2016.EN-883
Ferlet, P. (2021). Countries coordinates with longitude and latitude. GitHub Gist. https://gist.github.com/metal3d/5b925077e66194551df949de64e910f6

The EPILOBEE PROGRAM

The states participating in the program

Save the bees!

The protection and preservation of the bee population is crucial from a food safety perspective as pollination pollination services they perform could be measured in the billions of dollars a year.

The size of the APIARIES

The correlation between the size of the apiary and mortality

The program found that the highest mortality rate affected the older hobbyist beekeepers with small apiaries and relative little experience, meanwhile the 30-45 years old professional beekeepers with larger migrating apiaries experienced the lowest rate of bee mortality and in general they had disease free colonies.

MORTALITY over 2 years

The rootcause of mortality are manifold; ranges from disease to pesticide and loss of habitat. Another reason for the loss of bee population is the import of cheap honey and the small apriaries are unables to compete on price and cost, cannot weather losses for successive years and simply leave the business.