Recommended actions

• Run genuine biodiversity projects instead of supporting honey bees.
• Design and maintain your company grounds close to nature, for instance by creating green roofs, replacing non-native plants with native ones, and managing the grounds less intensively. On behalf of Grün Stadt Zürich, the ZHAW has produced an excellent guide to this: Praxishandbuch naturnahe Pflege (PDF download, in German).
• Have your company grounds mapped to record particularly worthy species, and then carry out targeted protection measures. We will help you if you wish — write to us.
• Use your customer communication to win your clientele over to an attitude that supports biodiversity.
• When erecting new buildings and renovating old ones, apply principles that are close to nature and support biodiversity from the outset.
• Raise your employees’ awareness, for example through internal communication or by booking talks on the subject at general meetings and similar occasions.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.

You will find further information and recommendations at: Stiftung Natur & Wirtschaft, Unternehmen und biologische Vielfalt (Bodensee Stiftung), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, PDF download)

• Make sure that everyone within your organisation is familiar with the subject.
• Do informative work towards the public.
• Keep the subject in mind within your own projects and communication.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.

Contact us if you need further information, or are interested in joint campaigns or in working together.

• Find out about alternative approaches to beekeeping, for instance at Freethebees and imkerschule.ch.
• Inform fellow beekeepers through the local associations and raise their awareness.
• Do not place honey bee apiaries in or at the edge of nature reserves; keep a minimum distance of one kilometre from the edge of nature reserves.
• Reduce the number of your honey bee colonies. It already makes a substantial difference to wild pollinators if you keep, say, five colonies instead of ten. Be aware that while honey bees can coexist well with wild pollinators during the mass flowering of oilseed rape or fruit, before and after it they are serious competitors for food. And bear in mind: a high density of honey bees not only competes with wild pollinators, it also affects your own honey yield adversely.
• Reduce competition for food between honey bees and wild pollinators by working with farmers, municipal authorities or conservation associations to increase the quantity of flowers around your apiaries, so that a varied and plentiful supply of flowers is available throughout the summer half of the year. Bear in mind: a supply of flowers that is both plentiful and rich in species matters particularly not only for wild pollinators but also for the health of your own honey bee colonies.
• Be aware that while beekeeping is a gentle use of nature, it makes no contribution to nature conservation.
• If you keep bees as a hobby, consider whether there might not be alternative pastimes that do less harm to wild pollinators.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.

• Private honey bee colonies often stand on farmland. Farmers can therefore attach conditions to the placing of apiaries. One of them could be a limit on the maximum number of colonies that may be installed.
• Make use of existing incentive schemes such as the proof of ecological performance (ÖLN).
• Help both wild pollinators and honey bees by increasing the quantity of flowers on your land wherever possible. Bear in mind: periods with no or few flowers (“forage gaps”), which occur in our farmed landscape above all during the summer months, have a devastating effect on numerous wild pollinators. Above all on bumblebees, whose colonies die before they reproduce if the supply of flowers is too small even for a short time.
• Rely on wild pollinators to pollinate your crops: wild pollinators pollinate your crops just as reliably as the honey bee, and in some cases better. Current research moreover shows that the fruit set of your crops is influenced positively by a varied community of pollinators. You must, however, make sure that wild pollinators have enough nesting opportunities in the form of sunlit deadwood, open patches of ground or perennial stem structures, and that they also find a sufficient supply of flowers before and after your crops are in flower.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.

• Keep nature reserves free of beekeepers’ honey bees. Bear in mind that honey bees fly over very wide radii when collecting pollen; buffer zones free of apiaries of at least one kilometre in width around nature reserves are therefore indispensable.
• Enforce existing protection regulations: beekeeping in important protected areas is prohibited in the cantons of Zurich and Bern, for example. Breaches should not be waved aside as trifling offences but pursued consistently.
• Attach conditions for ecological compensation to building projects.
• Ensure that municipal land (borders, communal land) is managed ecologically.
• Establish differentiated management plans for municipal land (mowing, fertilising, use of herbicides and pesticides), taking account of the species to be supported locally. Courses and advice for municipalities on supporting biodiversity are offered by PUSCH, for example.
• Carry out mapping of municipal territory in order to record the species worth protecting locally. Support them through targeted protection measures.
• Define sensible densities of honey bee colonies per square kilometre and landscape type, and put corresponding regulations into effect.
• Familiarise the population and political decision-makers with the subject.
• Contact us if you need further information or would like to work together (talks, mapping, and so on).

• Engage with the complex of biodiversity and honey bees objectively and critically.
• Work towards making the placing of honey bee apiaries subject to a permit; only then will the responsible authorities and units have an instrument for preventing apiaries in sensitive places.
• Work towards defining sensible densities of honey bees per square kilometre and landscape type. Authorities and specialist units would thereby gain a technical basis for preventing excessive concentrations of honey bees in a landscape.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.

• Report critically on honey bees and beekeeping.
• Explain the displacement effect that the mass occurrence of a single species can have among other species occupying the same ecological niches.
• Inform people about the consequences of a shrinking community of pollinators for the diversity of species.
• Contact us if you need technical information or images.
• Support IG Wilde Biene with a donation.