The EU RL for Bee Health held its 13^th annual workshop on 10^th October 2023 in Sophia Antipolis (France) after three years remotely. All participants were particularly happy to meet in person. Informal discussions were intense and the EU RL leaders had to kindly interrupt long coffee breaks to resume the annual workshop.

 

The participants had the pleasure to listen to two presentations of NRLs’ activities and the current honey bee health status in Estonia by Merle Kuus (Representative of the Estonian NRL) and in Lithuania by Tatjana Ščavlinskaja (representative of the Lithuanian NRL).

 

Franco Mutinelli, head of the Italian NRL, presented a state of play of the occurrence and surveillance of SHB in Southern Italy.  This year, Fayçal Meziani from the French Ministry of Agriculture presented the detection of small hive beetle in La Réunion island (France) in July 2022 and the action plan undertaken by the competent authorities. The French NRL presented the technical and scientific support provided to the competent authorities following the detection (Stéphanie FRANCO and Véronique DUQUESNE – respectively head and deputy head of the French NRL).

 

The EU RL also presented new information on the dissemination of Tropilaelaps over the world and focused on the feedbacks of the comparative laboratory test organised in 2022 and 2023 on Tropilaelaps mite identification by morphological methods. The workshop ended by the presentation of the EU RL activities during the last period and the work perspectives.

 

We warmly thank all the speakers for their interesting presentations and all the contributors for the fruitful discussions.

 

Documents and presentations of the workshop can be found here for the NRL network.