The European Landowners’ Organization (ELO) and the European Agricultural Machinery Industry Association (CEMA) awarded 2 projects with the European Bee Award. This award, that was established in 2014, has been committed to acknowledging, supporting and incentivising, innovative and scalable projects that ensure the protection and prosperity of pollinators in Europe.
The winner of the European Bee Award in the category ‘Land management practices’ is ‘Coup d’Pousse’, a project by Réseau Biodiversité pour les Abeilles. With the participatory action of melliferous fields sponsorship, farmers can register to benefit from seeds to sow flower strips in fallow land in spring, and intercrops in summer. Beekeepers can also register to get in touch with farmers who implanted floral resources in their department, to set up their hives there. In the category ‘Innovative and technological solutions’ the project ‘Connected scales’ won the award. This initiative by FDSEA Ile-de-France (Departmental Federation of Farmers Unions in the region Ile-de-France) aims to allow the best living conditions for bees by protecting them from phytosanitary treatments periods. Besides agricultural practices adaptation to bee protection, this project also implements flowering fallows to make them available to pollinators.
In addition, the ‘Special Mention of the Jury’ was awarded to ‘Smartomizer H3O protecting bees by reducing the pesticides use’, by the Spanish company Pulverizadores Fede. The Smartomizer H3O is an integrated pest management system that reduces negative effects on pollinators and also protects biodiversity by reducing the environmental impact of the high value crops protection task by carrying out precise and eco-responsible treatments.
In 2021, the European Bee Award competition received 28 applications from 12 different European countries. The award ceremony, that took place on the 7th of december last year, gathered over 60 participants: bee-keepers, policy makers, land managers, academia and representatives of the agri-food sector exchanged best practices, while getting inspired by new ideas on how to protect bees and enhance biodiversity in Europe.
Read more on this award here.
