Coimbra university involved in international project to increase bee resistance

An international project including the University of Coimbra (UC) wants to increase the resilience of beekeeping to ‘abiotic stress factors’, such as climate change, habitat loss and chemical compounds, including pesticides. The project, called ‘Better-B’, is funded by Horizon Europe, a programme for funding research and innovation in the European Union. It brings together 17 institutions from various countries and has been awarded around €6 million. Over the next four years, researchers will address different types of stress factors through monitoring, experimentation and ecological modelling to better understand the phenomena of competition between honey bees and wild pollinator species in situations of abundance, in the hope of assuring threatened honey bees the environment they need to flourish.