Photograph: Andrea Sorricaro
EurBee 11, the 11th European Conference of Apidology, Bologna, 7 to 10 September 2026
Aims and objectives
Every two years the European research community that works on bees gathers under the banner of EurBee, the European Conference of Apidology. In September 2026 it came to Bologna, hosted by the Research Centre of Agriculture and Environment of CREA together with the University of Bologna.
The city has a long claim on this subject. The National Institute of Apiculture was founded in Bologna in the 1930s and it grew into a research centre of international standing before being incorporated into CREA in the early 2000s. The group that organised EurBee 11 is the direct descendant of that institute. A short walk away stands the oldest university in the western world, founded in 1088, whose Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences shared the work of organisation.
What the committee wanted, above all, was breadth. Bee science has split into specialisms that often do not meet: pathology, ecology, genomics, sensor technology, agricultural policy, products. We wanted a programme in which barriers between traditional topics were broken, and managed and wild bees could be found in the same sessions. The keynote speakers were chosen with that in mind, as some of them work at the edges of traditional apidology rather than at its centre.
Cost mattered too. A Conference that prices out doctoral students loses the people whose careers it should be shaping, so the fee for early-bird students and doctoral candidates, including the membership to the EurBee Scientific Society, was held at its minimum.
We also wanted to have this edition’s motto ‘Like foraging bees. We seek novelty, we need cooperation and we profit from diversity’ inspiring a true sense of collaboration and inclusion among the participants.
Finally, we had decided early on that the Conference would not be funded by the agrochemical industry, whose commercial interests sit awkwardly beside the welfare of pollinators. That decision was easy to take and harder to pay for, and the grant of the Eva Crane Trust was part of the answer.
Format
The EurBee 11 conference was held at the Bologna Congress Centre in the period 7-10 September 2026. The Conference registered 551 participants from around 50 countries on every continent. Counting the co-authors of accepted contributions, roughly 70 countries were represented in the science presented at the Bologna Congress Centre. Among them were academic researchers and students, as well as veterinarians, agronomists, beekeepers, conservation practitioners, policy officials, developers of the digital tools that are steadily changing how bees are monitored and representatives of the industry committed to improve the bee welfare.
The Scientific programme held 492 accepted contributions, 196 of them oral communications arranged into 20 parallel symposia across four rooms, and 296 posters.
The contributions were grouped under the following themes:
- Welfare and ONEHEALTH
- Agroecology
- Climate Change
- Relationships Between Managed and Wild Bees
- Technological Applications & Bee-Based Monitoring Networks
- Microbiome and Nutrition
- Plasticity and Genomic Variation
- Bee Decline and Policies
- Ethics in Bee Science
- Bee Products, Ecosystemic Services and Circular Economy
Sessions were combined so that participants following a particular thread had as little reason as possible to move between rooms. Six keynote lectures anchored the programme, each held in the main hall (Sala Europa) so that the whole Conference could attend together.
The EurBee 11 conference opened on the evening of 7 September with a ceremony and a performance by the Coro Jacopo da Bologna that, after executing ‘An die Freude’, the European anthem, gave the public an assay of Italian classical music, so that everyone had time to arrive and find each other before the science started. The afternoon of 9 September was given over to a guided visit of the historic centre of Bologna. It rained. Around 300 participants went anyway, and the walk through the porticoes turned out to be one of the more fondly remembered parts of the week.
The closing ceremony on 10 September included the two prizes (each consisting in annual subscription to a bee journal offered by IBRA and a sum of money provided by EurBee) awarded to early-career researchers. The Prof. Norberto Milani Award for the best oral communication went to Hedda Ørbæk, of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Bergen, for her work on the effects of honey bees on species diversity and on plant and pollinator interactions, and what these imply for sustainable beekeeping. The Prof. Ingemar Fries Award for the best poster went to Maxime Linard, of the Institut des Biomolécules Max Mousseron in Montpellier, for a study tracing how different combinations of GABA receptors may explain sensitivity to pesticides, from electrophysiology through to behaviour. A gala dinner and an assay of XIX century dances given by the Association 8cento closed the Conference.
Every participant received a printed copy of the 68-page Scientific programme and of the 588-page Book of Abstracts, published with ISBN 978-88-506-5699-8. It can be downloaded from the Conference website at www.eurbee2026.com/scientific-programme/ and from the Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21827595, where its DOI makes each contribution citable long after the meeting. The EurBee 11 Planner webapp could be downloaded from www.eurbee2026.com/conference-planner/ to tailor each participant’s Conference experience.
The keynote lectures
The six keynote lectures were the part of the programme supported by the Eva Crane Trust, and they set the tone of the week.
Fanny Mondet, of INRAE in Avignon, opened the scientific programme on 8 September with a lecture on honey bee health in the context of biological invasions, taking the varroa mite as the case study for what happens when a parasite arrives in a naive host population.
Domenica Auteri, of the European Food Safety Authority in Parma, followed with an account of how pesticide risk to bees is assessed under European regulation, and of how that framework is now evolving. Hearing the regulator describe the machinery from the inside is a rare thing at a research conference, and the discussion it prompted was among the liveliest of the meeting.
On 9 September, Björn K. Klatt, of Halmstad University in Sweden, asked whether the next agricultural revolution might be built around bees rather than around machinery, and what farming systems would have to look like for that to be true.
Jordi Bosch, of the University of Barcelona, then turned to solitary bees, the great majority of bee species and the group least served by the research effort, and to what a chemically loaded environment does to them.
On the final morning, Janez Prešern, of the Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, gave a deliberately sceptical assessment of digitalisation in beekeeping, weighing what sensors and data actually deliver against what they promise.
Oliver Schweiger, of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, closed the series with an analysis of the several distinct routes by which climate change threatens wild bees, from shifting flowering times to the narrowing of the ranges in which species can persist.
Conferences of this size can turn into a set of specialists talking past one another. The six lectures were the main defence against that, and by the last morning the same questions were coming back in rooms that had nothing else in common.
Conclusion
One point came up again and again, and it is worth stating plainly, since public discussion usually garbles it. The number of managed honey bee colonies is not in general decline worldwide. Beekeeping is an agricultural activity, and colony numbers follow markets and management. Wild bees are another matter. Many species are contracting in range and in abundance, and the most recent European assessment finds a substantial share of them threatened. Treating the two as one story hides the problem that most needs attention.
EurBee 11 also showed how quickly the field is being reshaped by methods borrowed from elsewhere. Sensors, automated image recognition, genomics and climate modelling now sit alongside the traditional apparatus of the apiary and the microscope, and the researchers using them were present in numbers that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
Apidologists who have followed the development of this science over recent decades cannot help but feel amazed by the rapid evolution of apidology, the progress of which they could witness at EurBee 11.
Meeting in General Assembly on 8 September, the members of EurBee elected Newcastle, in the United Kingdom, as the seat of EurBee 12. The Bologna committee will hand over its documentation and its experience to the incoming organisers.
How we benefited from the Eva Crane Trust
The Trust awarded 5,000 pounds sterling towards the travel and accommodation of the six invited keynote speakers, and the grant did more than its size suggests.
Speakers of this standing are not necessarily able to cover the costs of their own participation, and an independent organising committee cannot rely on a private sponsor to invite them.
With the grant in hand, we could issue invitations on scientific grounds alone, including to speakers from the borders of traditional apidology whose perspectives the community needed to hear. Since keynote costs are fixed and fall due whatever the attendance, covering them from outside also kept pressure off the registration fee charged to students. And a grant from a charitable trust with no commercial interest in the outcome is what made our decision to decline funding from agrochemical industry sustainable.
As it turned out, two of the six speakers cost the grant nothing. One could not accept reimbursement under institutional rules, and another travelled on funds of his own. The unspent balance has gone back to the Trust.
The support of the Trust was acknowledged in the printed programme, in the Book of Abstracts, on the Conference website and from the podium before, during and after the Conference, and all the participants knew whose generosity had brought the keynote speakers to Bologna.
Dr Antonio Nanetti, Chair of the Organising Committee of EurBee 11, CREA Research Centre of Agriculture and Environment, Bologna.
Ref.: ECT_2025121002C
Completed: 2026
