Our journey along the bees raised a lot of interrogations. The current matters of bees dramatic diminution over the world, called today the colony collapse disorder (see here) is a problem that needs an urgent and firm answer. As scientists and as well as concerned human being, we wanted to be part of the solution. We decided to seek answers during the competition through interaction with professional/amateurish beekeepers and knowledgeable searchers.

Integrated Human Practice :

As Einstein never said : "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live"

Our project started with a simple question, how could we help the best friend of humanity, how could we help Bees ?

From this simple question, and from the information we could gather at the time, our first idea was born. The project would be about feeding bee larva with a modified bacteria, part of their microbiota, that would allow them to be protected from pesticide.

In order to determine if our idea could really help beekeepers, we met with Mr. Phillipe Lecompte, president of the “bees biodiversity network”. He pointed out that the real problem wasn’t pesticide, but rather that, even if pesticide are indeed bad for bees, the real responsible of the CCD was pathogens (mostly P. larvae in the US, responsible of the American foolbrood decease and N. ceranae in France).

It would be the lack of informations and academical training that leads beekeepers to focus on pesticide rather than on the health of their colony. The widespread of ??????????

After such revelation, we asked beekeepers and searchers (directly and through survey (see section 2)) about our projet, the CCD and the solutions that we might work on (see section 3).

Find more information about or integrated human practice here