Apimondia

Apimondia is the World Federation of Beekeeping Associations –its members are the world’s national associations, and every second year Apimondia organises a major Congress. Since Apimondia was formed 127 years ago, this makes Apimondia’s Congress one of the oldest in the world! Like the Olympics, nations bid to host the Congress years in advance – and five years ago, in Istanbul in 2017, Russia won their bid to host the Congress in the city of Ufa, South of Moscow, in 2021. Of course, COVID intervened such that the event planned for 2021 had to be postponed, and by March this year, it was clear that the war in Ukraine meant that an alternative venue must be found, without time for a normal bidding process.

The Apimondia Executive Council took the expedient decision to hastily organise a Congress in Istanbul – it was feasible as we already had valuable experience of running the 2017 Congress there, and by good chance the same venue was available for dates this August. This meant that the Congress had to be hastily re-organised in just five months - a process that normally takes four years!

And thus the 47th Apimondia Congress took place during 24-28th of August --a slightly shorter Congress than usual, but nevertheless 3,700 people attended, representing 119 nations, though missing delegates from China and a few other nations that still have Covid-related travel restrictions.

The Executive Council took the opportunity to organise this Congress slightly differently - addressing three major topics during each morning of the three working days of the Congress: Honey purity and authenticity, Climate change, and Nature-based Beekeeping. The Congress Scientific Programme contained a further 22 Symposia addressing specific topics, as well as Round Tables and Workshops. All this was accompanied by a huge Trade Exhibition, the World Beekeeping Awards, Apimondia’s General Assembly, and Technical Tours. As we have come to expect from our Turkish hosts, there was a beautiful opening ceremony with bee dancers and music, and a vibrant closing ceremony too.

As President of Apimondia’s Scientific Commission Beekeeping for Rural Development, I organised the major symposium on Nature-based Beekeeping. As you will appropriate from the article on pages 5–7, Nature-based Beekeeping has wide definition, and this session was planned to highlight good, best beekeeping practises already underway worldwide, and on commercial scale. After my introduction, we heard from beekeepers around the world practising nature-based beekeeping at scale.

From Europe, we heard Sébastien Bonjour and Anne Bonjour-Dalmon describe Sébastien’s operation of a commercial bee farm with 1,500 colonies in France, aiming to interfere as little as possible with the colonies, and with a respectful attitude towards the bees – this includes never to kill queen bees.

From North America, we heard from Tucka Saville, a full-time beekeeper living from her commercial, naturebased beekeeping, managing 300 colonies in South Florida, treatment-free and highly bee-friendly.

From South America, we heard from Pablo Chipulina, who works in the northern area of ​the province of Chaco, Argentina. This area has few roads and little communication, meaning that the indigenous and Creole people who live there have few job opportunities. Organic beekeeping is now enabling more than 74 families to build good livelihoods. They have created the Association of Young People of the Impenetrable Chaqueño, an organisation that brings together producers in the area. They have 1,750 honey bee colonies managed according to organic protocol. Sadly Pablo was ill at the time of the Congress and his talk was kindly presented on his behalf by Marta Soneira.

From Africa, we heard from Janet Lowore and Dickson Biryomumaisho, explaining the importance of nature-based beekeeping in Africa and emphasising the importance of the feasibility of beekeeping for financially poor people.

Finally we heard talks from Apimondia Presidents of Commissions: Fani Hatjina on treatment-free beekeeping, and Cristina Mateescu, on the need for clean, residue -free bee produce for use in apitherapy.

This was just a glimpse of one session - there were of course hundreds of other talks presented during the Congress – that is the joy of an Apimondia Congress!

At the closing ceremony the consortium of Scandinavian nations Denmark, Norway and Sweden won the voting to host the Congress in Copenhagen in 2025.

Before that, next year in September 2023, the Congress will get back on schedule with the Apimondia Congress in Santiago, Chile. It promises to be a wonderful event, where these discussions will continue!

During this Congress I stepped down as President of the Apimondia Scientific Commission Beekeeping for Rural Development – I am delighted that Megan Denver of USA won the Members’ vote to replace me in this role – Congratulations Megan!

The slogan of the Apimondia (1) meeting that took place end of August in Istanbul was ‘Bees Unite the World’. To begin with, when assessing the validity of the claim, one of course has to define ‘world’. At the final session attendees were told that almost 4,000 beekeepers and bee scientists from over 100 countries had attended the event, which had been organised at rather short notice. The original date of 2021 had become untenable due to Covid, and the chosen location, Ufa in Russia, had become untenable because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Global events that made painfully clear that the somewhat naïve slogan and logo of the event was more wishful thinking than reality. (2).

Of course, the ‘Ersatz’ location Istanbul, probably the only location that could be found at short notice, had already been somewhat questionable in 2017, when an Apimondia took place there as part of the ‘regular rotation’. In an article on what was then my first Apimondia I had written: “… I remembered … that there had of course been another ‘elephant’ at the conference, one that was not mentioned at all, and that had been the cause for me going to Istanbul with a guilty conscience to begin with: the increasingly repressive government in Turkey, which imprisons critics in their thousands - including teachers, judges and even the chair of Amnesty Turkey with the absurd charge of “membership of a terrorist organization. (3).

So why did I even contemplate going in 2022? For one, I registered when I looked as if I could combine attendance with a business trip to the far East without creating extra air miles and emissions. More importantly, a number of friends and colleagues from Asia were coming to Istanbul, and there was no better way to meet them in person, after 2.5 years of lockdowns and travel restrictions. My resulting contact and follow up ‘to do’ list is almost longer than my conference notes on the presentations I managed to attend. Choices had to be made, according to the organizers they had ‘converted’ 600 submissions into 25 symposia in three parallel ‘streams’ and 250 posters.

Even so, somehow I must have picked less popular venues. There was not a single event I attended where the hall was full – rather the opposite. Even the opening session on honey adulteration started more than 20 minutes late – presumably because the main speaker was hoping for more people to show up … Others events such as the ‘Asia Round Table’ would have fitted into a large classroom. (4). Though to be fair, Chinese scientists and beekeepers could not travel to Istanbul because of ongoing Covid restrictions at home.

What else was missing? Nicola Bradbear, Apimondia’s President for the Scientific Commission for Rural Development (5) started her short introduction at the opening session with the statement that she had not seen a single bee (nor any other insect) since her arrival in Istanbul. I made it my mission on my daily 15 mins walk between my hotel and the conference centre to spot a bee or other insects – and there was one moment, literally a split second, when a bee (probably a wasp) crossed my sight line. (6).

In the afore mentioned article written five years ago I noted: “… at the opening ceremony (unless it was literally lost in translation) there was not a single mention of the words pesticide, neonicotinoids or related items.” Five years on that had indeed changed. To begin with there was a major session on climate change – possibly the best attended event I was at. But after all the record breaking headlines regarding heat, droughts and floods happening on a global scale this summer, the session felt mostly like a late token, as that horse has bolted the stable long ago. And this time there were, indeed, quite a number of lectures on the effects of glyphosate and other agri poisons, and statements how bad industrial farming and monocultures are for bees, insects and biodiversity in general.

What left a lasting impression with me was a comment from an elderly, grey haired Kenyan beekeeper, who has been keeping stingless bees all his life, but said (in a video clip) that this was no longer possible due to excessive grazing and pesticides in his region. And a presentation from Brazil demonstrated the sublethal effects the neonicotinoid Imidacloprid has on stingless bees. To me, both presentations are particularly noteworthy, because just prior to the start of the pandemic in 2020, I had the privilege of attending a conference on stingless bees which I summarised in an article under the headline: ‘The bees of the future have no sting.’ Is it too late for their survival already, too?

Another, major change compared to five years ago was a ‘major symposium’, on ‘Nature Based Beekeeping’. It included a session on ‘treatment-free beekeeping’ – which made me wonder just how far away we still are from true bee friendly beekeeping standards. ‘To treat, or not to treat’ is too simplistic an approach. The positive examples provided of apiaries managed without chemical inputs all had other key aspects that probably were more important for the survival of these colonies than not treating for Varroa. On a French island beekeepers harvest only the honey that is left over after the winter season – a method that was traditional in Black Forest beekeeping, too. Allowing bees to overwinter on their own honey stores rather than sugar water probably contributes more to their health and their ability to deal with stress factors such as changing climatic conditions or introduced pests and diseases than not applying oxalic acid.

One important topic has remained the same as in 2017: honey adulteration and standards. Prominent space was given to the introduction of a new standard published by US Pharmacopeia as part of their Food Chemicals Codex (FCC). At the beginning of the talk a conciliatory claim was made, that the new code was in effect ‘the same’ as the Codex Alimentarius by the FAO. This sounds reassuring, but I am convinced that it is, in effect, highly misleading. The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Codex defines ‘honey’ as follows: “Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honey comb to ripen and mature.” This definitely includes all Apis species - possibly the stingless bees, too? (7). FCC apparently copies this definition – but then ‘adapts’ technical standards (and testing regimes) to the ‘changed times’. As a result, most traditional beekeeping, most tropical honeys, and basically all bee species that are not A. mellifera are bound to fail. One example: Bees in a tropical setting struggle to get the moisture content below 20% - how can they in a climate which at times feels like ‘walking through water’? But mechanical reduction of moisture has now been defined as ‘honey adulteration’. (8).

What makes this debate even more problematic is that this FCC standard is not freely available – one has to order it from the USA for the hefty price of USD 150. I am still trying to get hold of a copy – even when willing to pay the process is complicated.

Admittedly, in this session a slot was given to the FAO, in this instance to a representative of the FAO’s programme on food systems of indigenous people. From what I know and have seen of the life such indigenous guardians of nature lead, everything they collect, produce, consume from bees would fail the FCC ‘definition’ – beginning with larvae as a major source of protein.

In other words, I don’t see much unity around the world of bees, but of course, one area where we are all in agreement is that there is too much honey fraud going on, we all have to do what we can to help prevent it. But lopsided proprietary standards and definitions are not the way to go about it. (9)

One small item of progress that I thought I spotted is that the honey testing method NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), which caused such an issue around the contest for the world’s best honey in the 2019 Apimondia in Montreal (when 45% of entries failed the testing) seems to have been ‘relegated’ to a position of being ‘one testing method among others’ – to be applied where appropriate only …

Almost the last item on the agenda of the closing session was the award for the ‘world’s best honey’, which went (after blind tasting by the expert jury) to a beekeeper from Greece. In view of the venue of this Apimondia perhaps a case of ‘taste over politics? (10)

1 Also known as the International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations.

2 The event was 'hybrid' and of course I have no way of knowing how many people logged in and from where.

3 E.g. email campaign by amnesty UK on Nov 21, 2018.

4 The contingent of beekeepers from Ukraine was more numerous than all of Asia combined - and it received frequent applause ...

5 Nicola, who of course heads Bees for Development (BfD) stepped down at the end of the conference - having served for 29 record breaking years. Megan Denver of Hudson Valley Apiary Supplies was elected as her successor.

6 Nicola's comment reminded me of the visit by the (late) Queen Elizabeth II of England, who had journeyed to my home region in Southern Germany in May 1965: During that visit her hope asked to he taken to a horse breeding station near Stuttgart, instead she was brought to a museum honouring a local poet in a small town that shared the same name as the horse breeding centre. When she was confronted with poems instead of stallions, she is on record as having asked: "But where are the horses"? So this Apimondia was a bee conference without bees in sight.

7 The Roundtable on Asia has begun work on a standard for stingless bee honey - an open and democratic process.

8 What did not come up, but what I would love to see in a honey standard: Why not ban foundation and comb made from plastic? Or plastic hives? With honey being slightly acidic, should the risk of plastic contamination not be taken more seriously than reducing water - keeping in mind that even water in water bottles sheds nano particles...

9 The ISO is also working on a standard - which will also cost money... Why?

10 The next Apimondia event is in 2023 in Chile; slogan: Sustainable Beekeeping from the South of the World. This means going back to the 'normal' bi-yearly Apimondia rhythm. The very last vote in Istanbul decided that the 2023 event will be held in Copenhagen: The Scandinavian bid won over the proposal from Budapest in the closing event in Istanbul.