Re-establishment OF TREE cavities
Project overview: This project creates and reintroduces tree cavities into the landscape. Tree cavities, which have become rare, are ecologically very important elements, serving as refuge, breeding, wintering or feeding places for many species worthy of protection, including wild honeybees. Providing larger tree hollows is the basis for protecting and promoting wild honey bees. Since 2013, FREETHEBEES has developed very specific skills in the construction, distribution and operation of tree cavities, and has played an innovative, pioneering role in this area.
Suitable trees with appropriate microhabitats and tree hollows of a useable size have become rare in Swiss nature. Tree hollows are not only habitat for wild honeybees, they are also used by many other- and sometimes highly specialized- species, or groups of species as refuge, breeding, wintering or feeding places. If these habitats are missing, the forest ecosystem is disturbed.
In order to strengthen the biodiversity- and thus the resilience- of a forest, tree microhabitats are already recognized and preserved and promoted in the event of forest encroachments. However, the process is lengthy and will only be able to influence the current challenge of consistently protecting tree cavity-dwelling species in the long term.
The non-profit organization FREETHEBEES therefore goes one step further and actively produces and distributes tree holes in the forest ecosystem. The main motivation for FREETHEBEES is to provide nesting sites for wild honeybees. As an extremely important and valuable by-product, the same cavities also offer habitats for many other tree-cavity-dwelling species, some of which are extremely worthy of protection. Just considering honey bees alone, there are 30 additional types of insects, 170 types of mites and arachnids, as well as thousands of microorganisms living alongside the colony in a symbiotic community. Viewed over time, honey bee colonies and other species and species communities diverge over time, and use the tree cavity over different periods of time.
The project at hand creates concrete, measurable, direct benefits. It also promotes interdisciplinary and benefit-oriented cooperation among nature conservation organizations, such as bird protection, bat protection, ant protection, and many more
On the part of FREETHEBEES, the project is closely interlinked with the ongoing Swiss BeeMapping project, which scientifically monitors habitats inhabited and uninhabited by honeybees for three years and creates the data basis for the health and survival rates of wild honeybees in Switzerland. The tree habitats created with the present project automatically flow into the Swiss BeeMapping project and, once placed, are scientifically monitored and evaluated by the project. In addition to important data on bee health under natural conditions, previously non-existent data on the temporal use of tree holes by different species are created. To date, nobody has been able to provide data on which species nest in which sequence in tree cavities, and which symbiotic relationships exist.
