Bees & Bugs: Europe’s urgent task to align policy with science to save pollinators

Yesterday’s webinar, “Bees & bugs: Europe’s urgent need to strengthen the protection of biodiversity against pesticides,” organized under the DGITEC e-MEP platform, brought together scientists, policymakers, and environmental advocates to spotlight one of Europe’s most pressing environmental crises: the alarming decline of pollinators.

Held from 12:00 to 14:30 CET, the event shed light on how a combination of stressors — including pesticide use, habitat loss, climate change, and pathogens — are piling up and pushing pollinator populations to the brink.

Multiple stressors: a dangerous cocktail for bees and bugs

Key speakers underscored that it’s not just one threat, but the synergistic effects of many, that are driving declines. While pesticides alone are harmful, their impact is amplified when combined with other factors like:

• Loss of diverse habitats, which deprives pollinators of food and nesting sites.

• Intensive monoculture farming, which reduces floral diversity.

• Climate change, leading to mismatches in flowering times and increased weather extremes.

• Parasites and diseases, which spread more easily when pollinators are stressed.

The webinar highlighted compelling data showing how these stressors accumulate over time, weakening pollinator immune systems and making them more vulnerable.

Pollinators — from wild bees to hoverflies and butterflies — are vital for over 75% of Europe’s food crops. Without them, our orchards, berry fields, and even coffee plantations would suffer drastic yield losses. Moreover, pollinators help sustain wild plants, which in turn support birds, mammals, and countless other insects.

As one speaker put it, “Protecting pollinators is not just about saving bees — it’s about safeguarding Europe’s biodiversity and long-term food security.”

Throughout the event, there was a clear consensus: Europe needs to urgently strengthen its policies on pesticide use. Participants advocated for:

• Accelerating the reduction of harmful pesticide use under the EU’s strategies.

• Supporting farmers in adopting agroecological practices that bolster biodiversity.

• Enhancing monitoring of pollinator health and pesticide residues.

• Funding more research on how multiple stressors interact.

The webinar concluded with a call to move from fragmented measures to integrated policies that tackle all stressors together, ensuring landscapes where both pollinators and people can thrive.

More than toxicity: complex pesticide impacts on pollinators

A striking point raised was that pesticide impacts on pollinators are not just about acute toxicity. It’s about how pesticide concentrations accumulate in colonies over time, with chronic and sublethal effects on behaviour, immunity, and reproduction. This is especially critical for honeybee colonies, which can bring contaminated nectar and pollen back to the hive, leading to prolonged exposure.

Moreover, toxicity alone doesn’t capture the full picture. The webinar emphasized that side effects, such as altered foraging patterns, reduced learning ability, or increased susceptibility to diseases, can be just as damaging — and are often overlooked.

Link to recording:

How can monitoring be done?

The discussion highlighted the need for robust pollinator monitoring schemes, which go beyond simply counting bee numbers. Ideas included:

• Using honeybees as bioindicators, given their wide foraging range and the fact they collect and store contaminated resources, making them excellent sentinels for landscape-level pesticide exposure.

• Developing protocols to systematically analyze pesticide residues in bee products and bees themselves, to understand actual exposure levels.

• Expanding monitoring to cover wild pollinators like bumblebees and solitary bees, though this poses more logistical challenges.

A key point was the call for more community-level assessments. Monitoring shouldn’t focus solely on single species but look at how entire pollinator communities — and the broader ecosystems they support — are being affected.

The feasibility of pesticide assessments

Participants discussed how feasible it is to perform comprehensive pesticide exposure assessments. This involves:

• Identifying which specific pesticides pollinators are actually exposed to, under real field conditions.

• Gathering consistent data across regions to build a clear picture of cumulative exposure.

• Integrating these data into risk assessments that also consider interactions with other stressors.

The webinar noted that while the science is progressing, there are still major gaps in our knowledge, particularly around how combined stressors impact long-term colony health and wild pollinator populations.

What protection goals do we need?

A representative from DG ENV pointed to the crucial question: What should be the specific protection goals for bumblebees and wild bees?

Unlike honeybees, which have been relatively well studied, the ecological needs of wild bees are more varied and less understood. Defining protection goals would require:

• Better ecological data on population dynamics and thresholds of decline.

• Understanding the functional roles of different pollinators in ecosystems.

• Philosophical and societal decisions about what level of biodiversity loss is acceptable.

As one speaker highlighted, setting these goals is partly a scientific endeavor — and partly a value-based, philosophical one, deciding how much nature we wish to preserve for future generations.

Moving forward: an integrated, science-informed approach

The webinar set the agreement that Europe needs a comprehensive approach to pollinator protection, combining:

✅ Stronger pesticide regulations that reflect real-world, multi-stressor impacts.

✅ Robust, coordinated monitoring schemes that use honeybees and wild pollinators as indicators.

✅ Clear, evidence-based protection goals for all key pollinator groups.

✅ Continued research to fill critical gaps — from pesticide residue pathways to ecosystem-level effects.

To secure Europe’s biodiversity and food security, we must move beyond single-stressor, single-species risk assessments. A broader vision — integrating pesticides, habitat, climate, and community health — is urgently needed.

📜 The legal framework: is it enough?

Speakers reviewed the EU’s existing legal framework for protecting bees and biodiversity from pesticides:

• Regulation (EC) No. 1107/2009 Establishes the legal requirement for risk assessments on bees — covering honey bees (HB) and other pollinators.

• Regulations (EC) No. 283/2013, 284/2013 and 546/2011 Set out detailed data requirements and uniform principles.

Risk assessments under these laws consider:

✅ Acute & chronic toxicity (both adult bees and larvae)

✅ Effects on development & behaviour, as well as exposure through nectar, pollen, guttation water, dust, honeydew and more.

Yet several speakers noted that these regulations often fall short because they don’t always incorporate thresholds or methodologies scientists identify as critical. As one participant bluntly put it, Risk assessments can be as fantastic as possible, but if policies ignore the scientifically defined thresholds, it’s ultimately useless.

🐝 Monitoring pesticides through bees: INSIGNIA project

The webinar also referenced the INSIGNIA project, an innovative EU initiative that uses honeybees as bio-monitors to track pesticide residues and environmental pollutants. Given that honeybees forage over large areas and collect diverse samples of nectar and pollen, they serve as natural integrators of what’s happening in the landscape.

This approach gives a more realistic picture of what pesticides bees — and by extension, the environment — are actually exposed to, moving beyond lab simulations.

📖 The Bee Guidance Document

Next, the conversation turned to the EFSA Bee Guidance Document, a key scientific reference setting out how to conduct robust bee risk assessments. However, despite being scientifically solid, it has faced delays in full regulatory uptake.

Revised guidance on the risk assessment of plant protection products on bees

A brief history: from drastic losses to slow regulatory milestones

📅 1990s-2000s:Beekeepers across Europe saw drastic colony losses, triggering a wave of scientific research into the chronic and sublethal effects of neonicotinoids. Analytical tools improved, but policy lagged behind.

📅 2008-2010:Beekeepers got organised, pushing for better risk assessments through the ICPPR (International Commission for Plant-Pollinator Relationships). Still, early methodologies often ignored evolving science — and conflicts of interest were flagged.

📅 2011-2013:EFSA formed its Bee Expert Group. The 2013 milestone guidance explicitly recognised risks to larvae, bumblebees and solitary bees, and multiple exposure routes (nectar, pollen, dust, water).➡ But this was never officially adopted, blocked by a majority of Member States.

🚧 From 2013 to today: Political inertia vs. scientific urgency

📅 2013-2019:Member States repeatedly blocked full implementation of the 2013 Bee Guidance, watering down requirements by omitting chronic and larval toxicity from proposed amendments.

📅 2019:The European Parliament stepped in, vetoing these weak proposals, calling for the original robust guidance to be fully implemented.

📅 2018 & 2022:Assessments of neonicotinoids and sulfoxaflor using the 2013 methodology confirmed unacceptable risks — leading to restrictions largely confining their use to greenhouses.

📅 2021-2023:EFSA continued to review and strengthen the guidelines, including defining Specific Protection Goals (SPGs) for bumblebees and solitary bees. The latest milestone in 2023 agreed on models to cover acute, chronic, and sublethal risks to multiple species and life stages.

🔄 Why we need a system approach — not fragmented rules

Today’s speakers stressed that even the best monitoring (like through the INSIGNIA project using honeybees as sentinels) is not enough if policy remains siloed:

🐝 We have separate rules for plant protection products,🐄 others for veterinary medicines,🦟 and yet more for biocides and pest control.

➡ But nature does not compartmentalise. Bees, bugs and ecosystems experience all these stressors simultaneously, accumulating impacts across regulations that never meet.

✅ What comes next?

• A potential 2026 update of the Uniform Principles is on the horizon. Will it finally integrate the full scientific scope of risks, including chronic, larval and multi-species effects?

• The call is clear: Europe needs to shift to a truly systems approach, addressing multiple stressors together — from pesticides to pathogens — to halt biodiversity decline.

Soil is not even monitored for pesticide residues!

This is despite the fact that soil health is fundamental to biodiversity, food production, water quality, and climate resilience. It acts as a sink for pesticide build-up, indirectly affecting plants, insects, and ultimately us.

🌱 Bottom line

Policymakers have had the scientific tools in hand for over a decade. Now they must show the political courage to fully implement these protections, and to design new regulations that look at ecosystems as interconnected wholes — where soil, water, plants and pollinators are all bound together.