Bees, like seagulls, flocks and some birds of prey, such as peregrine falcons, and, for some time now, also some families of wild boars, are found better in cities than in the countryside. These conclusions have been reached by a team of experts who, as part of the urban biomonitoring project “Apincittà” condotto FAI-Federation of Italian Beekeepers, municipal administration and the forest police force, carried out melisso-palynological analyses, to classify the flowers visited by bees in Rome after they have been positioned a network of hives in strategic places.
The investigations showed that the quantities of pollen detected in the honey samples of the bees that worked in the urban space of the capital are abundantly higher than those normally detected in a rural or natural production area visited by sentinel bees. The reasons for this surprising result are to be found in the fact that balconies, terraces, gardens, city parks offer an unusual, assorted and rich pasture of blooms useful to pollinating insects, and to honey bees in particular, thanks to an infinite variety of floral plants concentrated in a delimited area, that of the city walls, unlike the countryside where large monocultural agricultural extensions they require the bees to travel long distances.
But this is not the only result that emerged from the ApinCittà Project: thanks to the work of sentinel bees, it was discovered that urban biodiversity, which should be much lower than a rural area or a natural ecosystem, is instead very rich and only partially known .
They are indeed beyond 150 botanical species so far surveyed, thanks to this project. Some of these were not present, at the time, in the repertoires of the flora of Rome: as if to say that we did not know we had this type of "horizontal or vertical" green useful for bees. And in any case it turns out that we still don't know enough about what the ecosystem of the capital and of historic cities in general means.
Today, for example, thanks to the sentinel bees of ApinCittà we can say that the following botanical species are to be included in the plant ecosystem of Rome: Magnolia grandiflora, Washingtonia robusta, Viburnum lantana, Viburnum opulus, Rhododendron hirsutum, Schinus mole, Hedysarum coronarium, Lavatera olbia, Acacia cyanophylla, Ceratonia siliqua. Names that from now on will have to be included in the repertoire of Capitoline botanical species.
The biomonitoring stations of the ApinCittà Project are constantly increasing: the 'Laboratory Station Number 1', with the installation of three hives in the headquarters of the Carabinieri Forestry, Environmental and Agro-Food Unit Command (Cufa), was followed by many others and now Bodies, Institutions , Individuals as well as Beekeepers are stepping up to be included in this network.
As a result, the initially active stations doubled in a very short time, going from 10 to 20 and this will allow further study of the data relating to the project, in particular in terms of characterizing the botanical profile of each city quadrant and the types of honey it can offer .
The hives used as biomonitoring stations in the ApinCittà Project do not replace the control units that monitor the parameters of the law on the trend of air pollution or other matrices monitored in the city. Bees, on the other hand, are used to detect additional parameters related to environmental quality of air, water, soil and living organisms (environmental compartments).
With regard to heavy metals, FAI specifies that honey falls within the provisions of EU Regulation 2015/1005 which sets a maximum lead content in honey of 0,10 mg/kg. The data collected so far by the ApinCittà Project show that we are well below the suggested values with an average of 0,022 mg/kg. A further surprise taking into account that among the samples observed so far there are biomonitoring stations in Largo Argentina, Via Giosuè Carducci, Porta Maggiore, GRA-Anagnina/Tuscolana.
“It is therefore confirmed that the sentinels of the Italian bee supervise and protect botanical diversity – he declares Raffaele Cirone, President of FAI-Federation of Italian Beekeepers – and, at the same time, make it possible to monitor the environmental sectors of the Eternal City. The active participation of citizens, the meeting between beekeepers and companies, institutions and research bodies will serve to convey an example – what bees offer us every day – of cohesion, hard work, sharing towards a common goal”.
The FAI, as part of the ApinCittà Project, has also promoted the diffusion of useful seeds for bees, to be spread in every uncultivated place in the urban area of Rome.
The project launched in Rome has illustrious precedents that have produced excellent results: In Vancouver, the non-profit organization Hives for Humanity in collaboration with the University of British Columbia, activated an urban beekeeping project dedicated to social inclusion in 2017 and monitoring city smog. Before that, since 2006, bees have been monitoring air pollution at the German Frankfurt airport, the fourth busiest airport in Europe.
