A B&B for bees: Wageningen startup gets impact award

BeeGrateful has become the winner of the Future Planet Award. This award is presented each year by Wageningen University & Research and is intended for the startup with the most impactful concept.

The company of Florence van Haastrecht and Zoe van Helvoirt monitors wild bees in the city with specially designed bee hotels. And the numbers show that there is a need for this. More than half of the wild bee species in the Netherlands are currently threatened with extinction. Causes? The use of pesticides, intensive agriculture and urbanization. As more and more space is being built up, important nesting sites and food sources are disappearing. And that's a big problem, Van Haastrecht stresses. 'Wild bees are the most efficient pollinators for plants and crops. Together with other pollinators, they are responsible for about 80 percent of the pollination of our food crops. So fewer bees means less food, lower yields and ultimately a disrupted ecosystem.'

A place for the wild bee

BeeGrateful, as mentioned, wants to do something about this, with the deployment of stylish bee hotels around lampposts. This so-called Streetlight Bee&Bee Premium offers five hundred nesting opportunities for bees and other pollinators in the city. Every detail has been thought about from nest length to the diameter of the entrances. All this makes the bee hotel ideal for monitoring research. For example, municipalities and business park managers will gain more insight into the area's biodiversity.