(Huesca, July 3, 2025) The Huesca Campus of the University of Zaragoza (Unizar) is coordinating, within the BeeGuards project, the preservation of the genetic material of European honey bees with the aim of conserving the biodiversity of this species and helping to address the growing challenges faced by beekeeping.
Germplasm bank managers from six countries are participating this week in a meeting at the Huesca campus of the Aragonese public university to receive training in reproductive and genetic biotechnologies for drone semen cryopreservation, which have been developed and refined by local researchers.
The School of Agricultural Engineering is hosting this meeting, which began last Tuesday with the arrival of the various delegations and will continue until next Saturday, July 5. The event is coordinated by professors from the Huesca campus — Jesús Yániz, Pilar Santolaria, and Matías Casalongue — together with German researcher Jakob Wegener.
BeeGuards is a project funded by the European Union that aims to provide sustainable management practices, innovative breeding strategies, and digital and forecasting tools to help the beekeeping sector adapt to a changing environment.
“We focus on determining how factors such as management practices, climate change, nutrition, or resource limitations drive emerging stressors that threaten colony health and undermine the resilience of European beekeeping,” explain the project coordinators.
Conservation of honey bee genetic material
One of BeeGuards’ working lines is the creation of honey bee semen banks, which also aim to preserve and disseminate genetic material from selective breeding programs. Countries such as Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, Slovenia, Malta, North Macedonia, and Croatia are actively involved in the development of these cryobanks, tailored to their respective regional subspecies.
In Spain, this work is being carried out from the School of Agricultural Engineering of the Huesca Campus, in collaboration with the Government of Aragon’s Center for Animal Selection and Reproduction, located in Movera, which houses the Germplasm Bank for Apis mellifera iberiensis.
The team led by Professor Jesús Yániz, Chair of Animal Production at the Huesca campus, is responsible for developing and supervising the techniques that will safely and durably preserve frozen drone semen doses in the various European cryobanks. This week, bee germplasm bank representatives from Poland, Greece, Germany, Italy, Croatia, and different parts of Spain are in Huesca to receive training in these techniques.
The university-based training sessions will be complemented by field visits to local apiaries involved in the project.
Event program
https://campushuesca.unizar.es/noticia/curso-practico-de-criopreservacion-de-semen-en-abejas-meliferas
BeeGuards
https://beeguards.eu/about/