In June, the Institute for Bee Protection (JKI) completed the third of five sampling rounds of this year’s bee monitoring at 16 locations in Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony. Most of Germany’s 600+ wild bee species are flight-active for only a few weeks each year. Accordingly, many species can be broadly divided into spring, early-summer, and late-summer bees. This is why the monitoring program requires repeated sampling throughout the year. Only in this way the diversity of bee communities in agricultural landscapes is comprehensively mapped.
Data sampled this spring already provide some preliminary insights into the bee communities. For example, in April and May 2026, approximately 30% more wild bee individuals were recorded compared to the previous year. Honeybees were observed at the majority of sites this spring. This underscores the importance of these bees—which depend on beekeeping—for pollinator communities in agricultural landscapes. Bumblebees have also already been detected at nearly all sites, although spring colonies of this bee group typically consist of very few workers.
To minimize the impact on pollinator populations through sampling, our bee monitoring approach does not involve continuous sampling. Instead, five sampling dates are scheduled in accordance with the phenological progress of the year such that they span the entire bee season. For example, the two spring dates coincide with the onset of winter rapeseed flowering and the onset of black elderberry flowering, respectively (source: Deutscher Wetterdienst). In the 2024–2026 period alone, the calendar dates of these phenological events in the study areas varied by days to weeks, depending on the year. This demonstrates that taking phenology into account - especially in spring - is essential for generating comparable data over multiple years.
Further information on the monitoring of bee communities can be found here.