One Language for Bees: How a Global Community Is Transforming Pollinator Data
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From fragmented records to a shared knowledge infrastructure
Every day, beekeepers generate knowledge.
A colony inspection in Spain. A Varroa count in Finland. A honey harvest record in Italy. A disease diagnosis in Germany. A research project in France. A monitoring programme in Belgium.
Individually, these observations are valuable. Together, they represent one of the largest potential sources of information for understanding pollinator health, improving beekeeping practices, supporting scientific research, and informing public policy.
For decades, however, there has been a fundamental obstacle: while people could understand each other, computer systems often could not.
The same phenomenon could be recorded using different terms, different definitions, different units, and different data structures. Colony strength might be measured differently across monitoring programmes. Varroa infestation could be expressed as a percentage in one database and as mites per hundred bees in another. A disease might appear under several names depending on the language or software platform being used.
As a result, valuable information became trapped in isolated databases, spreadsheets, reports, and management systems: researchers struggled to combine datasets, institutions struggled to compare results, policymakers struggled to access coherent evidence.
And beekeepers often found that the observations they collected in the field could not fully contribute to larger monitoring efforts.
The challenge was not a lack of data.
The challenge was creating a common language.
Building a shared language for pollinators
Today, thanks to years of collaboration between beekeepers, scientists, veterinarians, data specialists, institutions, and software developers, that situation is beginning to change.
At the centre of this transformation is the Pollinator Ontology (POLON), the knowledge framework that forms the core of the EU Pollinator Hub Controlled Vocabulary (EUPH-CV).
Recently, the scientific foundations, methodology, and development process behind this work achieved an important milestone: the manuscript describing the Pollinator Ontology and the EU Pollinator Hub Controlled Vocabulary has successfully completed scientific peer review and has been accepted for publication in PLoS ONE, one of the world's leading open-access scientific journals.
This recognition represents much more than an academic achievement. It validates years of collaborative work aimed at solving a practical problem faced by the global pollinator community: how to make pollinator-related information understandable not only to people, but also to machines. Read “The EU pollinator hub controlled vocabulary: An ontology for pollinators” on PLoS ONE
More than a dictionary
When people hear the word "vocabulary", they often imagine a list of definitions. The Pollinator Ontology goes much further.
It provides a structured representation of knowledge in which every concept is clearly defined, uniquely identified, and connected to related concepts through formal relationships that can be understood by both humans and computer systems. Computers can recognise it. Researchers can compare it. Institutions can analyse it.
Data collected in different countries and different systems can become interoperable and knowledge becomes reusable.
The result is a shared framework capable of supporting collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and borders.
The EU Pollinator Hub: where knowledge becomes infrastructure
Pollinator Ontology was developed within the framework of the EU Pollinator Hub, an initiative sponsored by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
The Hub was created to promote the standardisation and internationalisation of pollinator-related information, while supporting the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship.
FAIR stands for:
Findable
Accessible
Interoperable
Reusable
These principles are increasingly recognised as essential for modern science and evidence-based policymaking.
Without common standards, data remains fragmented.
With shared semantic frameworks, information collected today can continue generating value for years to come.
The EU Pollinator Hub provides the technological environment that enables this vision. Through its collaborative infrastructure, experts can contribute concepts, refine definitions, propose translations, and continuously improve the vocabulary as scientific knowledge evolves.
Why this matters
Pollinators are much more than producers of honey or providers of pollination services. They are among the most sensitive indicators of environmental change, reflecting the combined effects of agricultural practices, climate change, habitat loss, pests, diseases and pollution.
Understanding what is happening to pollinators, therefore, means understanding what is happening to our ecosystems.
To achieve this, observations collected by beekeepers, researchers, institutions and monitoring programmes must be comparable, accessible and reusable. The Pollinator Ontology and the EU Pollinator Hub Controlled Vocabulary were created precisely for this purpose: to provide a common framework that enables knowledge generated across different countries and contexts to contribute to a shared understanding.
The development of this knowledge infrastructure has been made possible through the collaboration of the Apimondia Working Party on Bee Data Standardisation (WP12), EFSA, BeeLife, ZIP Solutions and a growing international community of contributors. By combining scientific expertise, practical beekeeping knowledge and digital innovation, they have created a resource that can support research, policymaking and pollinator protection far beyond national borders.
