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The BEESPOKE project
BEESPOKE is a project funded by the INTERREG North Sea Region Programme.
Insect pollination is worth €15 Billion in the EU, but the number of wild pollinators is decreasing due to loss of flower-rich habitats. As a response the EU adopted a pollinator initiative in 2018. The North Sea Region (NSR) is one of the most productive agricultural areas, but pollinators are in decline across the region.
The BEESPOKE overall objective is to increase the number of pollinators and crop pollination on local and landscape scale by providing new expertise, tools and financial knowledge to land managers and policy makers, in order to create more sustainable and resilient agro-ecosystems.
BEESPOKE brings a wide range of partners together – from policy makers, research institutes, advisory and end users from seven different NSR-countries – to develop new products and approaches to increase the diversity of insect pollinators and crop yields by 10%. We will develop bespoke seed mixes and habitat management guidelines to support the suite of pollinators required for 14 crop types on 72 demonstration sites.
Sites for each crop will showcase best management practices, and training materials will be developed for biodiversity monitoring and for measuring pollination. The same type of agro-ecosystems occur across the NSR and transnational cooperation will give economies of scale for development of these novel tools.
This approach will enable land managers to adopt pollinator management as a routine practice, fostering a bottom-up land manager approach, ensuring a continuing improvement of crop pollination by insects.
Latest Project News
Soft Fruit Wildflower Mix
03 March 2023VLM - Cultivating Native Seeds
06 February 2023VLM conducted tests with trial plots for cultivating native seeds. Five trial plots (for five plant species) were established at three locations. Th…
Read morePreliminary research results by NIAB entomologist Celine Silva
25 January 2023The BEESPOKE project has been developing a range of seed mixes for planting on farms to help reverse the decline in pollinators. These have been targ…
Read moreNew paper: the benefits of better designed wildflower mixes
13 January 2023A new paper shows the compared to standard mixes.
These results were published as part of the Ph…
Read more