Pollinate Europe is a network and a concept for raising awareness and creating knowledge about the situation for solitary bees, bumblebees, honeybees and other pollinators.
The Network was founded in Sweden in 2017 and launched the first campaign “Our Friends the Pollinators” in spring 2018.
Pollinate Sweden and Pollinate Europe started when founders Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen and Anna Lind Lewin worked with beekeeping and honey and realised that despite the importance of pollination in food production, knowledge still is scarce on how to support pollinators.
Our goal with creating this network is to engage and educate politicians, farmers, food producers, engineers, landscape architects, gardeners, teachers and the general public in different available solutions that can help pollinators to survive in gardens, parks, roadsides and fields.
We started in 2017 with gathering some of Sweden’s experts, authorities and representatives of NGOs working with pollination to a series of workshops. There was full agreement to start a collaboration between the twenty representatives taking part.
Through coordinated events we have developed a campaign called Pollination Week that takes place at the end of May every spring. Our concept is growing from year to year and can in the long term become an important and positive event for citizens all over Europe to share.
In spring 2019 we arranged a Pollination Forum where stakeholders together created support to fuel the passage of a National Pollination Strategy in Sweden and other countries.
In spring 2019 Pollinate Europe started a collaboration with the business chain Plantagen, which is leading in garden supply in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Through an instore campaign we will help their customers to choose the right plants, trees and seeds to support pollinating insects.
We want the question of pollination to become as important and well known as climate change, plastic pollution or food waste, just to mention some other areas where people have gathered together to create attention on an urgent matter.
Pollinate Sweden is funded by the National Apiculture Program in Sweden.