A digital platform for wild and honey bee data is being developed at the Institute for Bee Protection at the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) in Braunschweig. The platform aim is to gather and harmonize heterogeneous spatiotemporal data, to establish a nationwide cooperation among specialist institutes and MonViA project partners. For example, land use, environmental data, and climate data are available for long-term spatiotemporal trend analyses on wild and honey bee populations. (https://ojs.openagrar.de/index.php/Kulturpflanzenjournal/article/view/15156 ).

Currently, novel research fields and companies embrace the rapid development of new technologies in the field of automated monitoring. Technical surveillance capabilities of honey bee hives with wireless hive-scales with weather stations are already in use across the world, while additional technical applications are in development. New digital tools for innovative monitoring are in need for testing. Also wild bee and honey bee occurrences are documented with recognition apps on phones, as part of Citizen Science initiatives (see MonViA - Citizen Science - "Honey and wild bee monitoring " ).

In this sub-project, a digital platform for monitoring wild and honey bees is designed, implemented and operated. We collect and combine regional and national data from different sources in one database. In the long term, the data is used to derive various indicators, to enable assessing to what extent agricultural practice and land use affect the distribution and vitality of wild and honey bees (e.g., regarding pollination services or interspecies competition for floral resources. The data National data are link to European and worldwide databases. A German Wild Bee Network is currently set up to facilitate the sharing of wild bee data. Aside wild bee experts, also citizen scientists may share observation data, e.g., via bee recognition apps (see MonViA - Citizen Science - “Wild and honey bee monitoring” ). We are gathering and digitizing historical honey bee data, to allow for long term trend analyses, for the MonViA-Projekt „Honeybee monitoring” , alongside the Citizen Science Projekt „Wild and honey bee monitoring”, all performed in preparation of efficient future monitoring programs.

Further information will be available here shortly