Apimondia 2023 Santiago: 230 Speakers, 120 Vendors, and Not Nearly Enough Time

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If you were to arrive in Santiago, Chile on the evening of this past September 3, you would see the city spreading out before you under a backdrop of the jagged snowy Andes, glowing pink in the twilight. At least that’s how it looked when I was leaving Friday night, but I arrived the morning of the 4th after an uncomfortable overnight flight from Bogota, and then slept until nearly noon and thus lost my only opportunity to do some sightseeing.

This past September 4-8 was the 48th Apimondia World Beekeeping Congress. The Apimondia conference is held once every two years, in a different country each time. I had attended just once previously, in 2017 in Istanbul, though in 2014 I attended an Apimondia regional symposium in Arusha, Tanzania, which was comparable in size and professionalism.

The conference consists of a week of presentations, simultaneously occurring in four halls, in this case in a convention center called the Espacio Riesco. The overall theme of this year’s conference was “Sustainable beekeeping, from the south of the world.” Each hall had a series of presentations around a topic such as “bee biology,” “bee health,” “technology,” “pollination,” “apitherapy,” “rural development,” and some regional sessions dedicated to, for example, Europe, Africa or the Americas.

There were, in all, over 230 speakers. One can bounce between the halls to catch all the presentations that catch one’s interest. Translation at this conference was offered via headsets into English, Spanish or Portuguese. One gripe I had was that one needed a different pair of headphones for the bottom two halls than for the upper two, and it was a bit of a bother

going to the desk to trade them constantly. Eventually I realized though that as you needed to trade in your driver’s license (or passport!) for the headphones, and I have both U.S. and Australian driver’s licenses, I just used both IDs and got both sets of headphones.

one in 2025 is already set at Copenhagen, but at this conference we would be determining 2027, and hence Tanzania had a fairly big booth promoting their bid for 2027. In competition with them was Dubai, who actually had a very small booth. Personally I was heavily in favor of Tanzania, and worried that perhaps Dubai’s booth was so small because they were so overwhelmingly confident they’d have it in the bag. Also I was rather surprised to see at Hungary’s booth that they are already campaigning to host in 2029. I’ve never been able to figure out who my representatives in the voting are, which I wish was easier to figure out because I usually have a strong opinion on where the next meeting should be. (In 2017 I would have voted Slovenia over Russia and I think in retrospect now that

There was also an expo section with over 120 exhibitors. There were representatives of many of the biggest equipment manufacturers with some of their newest products on display, as well as other organizations, and national booths for Brazil (huge), Argentina, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Slovenia, Hungary, Dubai, and Ukraine.

At every Apimondia there is a vote among the voting delegates at the end to determine where the next-after-next conference will be. The next

More than 3800 people attended the 5-day conference.

The Expo featured over 120 exhibitors from around the world.

would have indisputably been the better decision.)

More than 3800 people attended the conference. Of those, about 40% came from Chile, 70% came from Latin America in general, and 154 people attended from the United States attended, of whom I think I met maybe three. Of the remaining quarter of the attendees there were representatives from all over the world (89 countries altogether).

In addition to the presentations, there were walls set up in the halls to give room for 430 posters detailing research for which there hadn’t been time for presentations, and usually during peak hours (lunchtime) the poster’s author could be found near it to answer questions.

One gets a good feel for the general state of things around the world while

I really hate to say something so cliche and cheesy, but with all such conferences I’ve found that the friends I’ve made there have been a highlight. From past conferences I’ve met and kept in contact with experts in various subjects, and I’ve benefited from be- In addition to the presentations, 430 research posters were displayed in the halls, staffed when possible by the authors.

bees prefer fresh pollen while the older bees prefer the older bee bread, which has more of an amino acid that supports flight (proline), and nurse bees seem uninterested in pollen substitute patties. A study of queen rearing success in different-sized nuc boxes by Dr. Fani Hatjina showed best success in half-Langstroth size boxes. Dr. M. Marta Guarna presented about how analyzing the gut flora of queen bees (via their defecation) can tell us if they’ve suffered heat stress which would reduce their quality. I learned bees can swim (I thought bees in water were always in the act of drowning) and will preferentially swim toward a darker area unless they’ve been exposed to pesticides.

As Randy Oliver (one of the few Americans I ran into there) said, “Overall, the feedback that I got from many beekeepers was that the conference was more oriented to scientists than to beekeepers.” And I would tend to agree, I enjoy hearing all the latest research but I’m not sure knowing the swimming habits of bees or at what age they most like pollen patties will have much effect on my day-to-day. Probably the most practical things for regular beekeeping were further evidence of how much even a little temperature stress is detrimental to queen performance (Marta Guarna), that requeening by simply putting a new queen cell in the super without killing the old queen only works 4% of the time (Shelley Hoover), and delaying nuptial flights with a labyrinth entrance is much more effective than by cooling the hive (I can’t recall the authors or seem to find it in the program).

at Apimondia, and the general state of things seems to be this: Small hive beetle is spreading into Europe via Italy, and has recently been detected in several countries in Central America; a mysterious foulbrood-like disease has been spreading in Iran (see the research of Dr. Pegah Valizadeh); and varroa has been spreading in Australia for a year now. (Incidentally two weeks later, the day I’m writing this, Australia has officially given up attempting to eradicate varroa.)

I’ll mention as examples some of the presentations I found interesting, but of course one can only be in one place at a time and I spent more time in bee biology and rural development than technology or apitherapy. There was an interesting presentation (Dr. Kaylin Kleckner) on the age at which bees consume pollen; it seems the nurse

Randy’s roundup of the main topics of discussion consists of: “Fake honey depressing honey price; climate change [I also noticed this is now being discussed as an obvious and impactful fact]; overstocking of bees over the landscape carrying capacity; better pollen subs to account for the above; sustainable, non-contaminating varroa control measures, and the failure of amitraz; selective breeding for mite resistance; and use of apitherapy around the world — honey, propolis, venom, and other bee products for medicinal uses.”

ing able to ask them questions in their subject area that occur to me. Or, for example, I’ve heard conflicting stories about how exactly the Africanized honey bees escaped from Dr. Warwick Kerr in 1956; well, at the conference I shared an Uber with a Brazilian beekeeper whose father worked with Dr. Kerr at the time. (Apparently indeed someone removed a queen excluder that shouldn’t have been removed, though those immediately involved would never say who.)

One near-universal gripe I heard from everyone at the conference was that the lunch options were terrible; there were only about four food carts with very low-quality food. Only on the last day did I discover that about three blocks away there were some restaurants, but I don’t recall the food options being so unsatisfactory at previous conferences. Additionally there were no hotels nearer than about four miles away on the other side of a small mountain, which took at best about 12 minutes by Uber but over 40 minutes to an hour going back at rush hour. Also, at the previous conferences I’d been to (Arusha and Istanbul) usually there was a lot of hanging out and going to dinner with other participants, but by the time we’d gone back to our hotels we were all so separated that

I didn’t hang out with anyone other than my friend Doug Johnson (beekeeper from Washington State) in the evenings … except for the reception hosted by “the Scandinavians” on Thursday evening.

tralia and at this time Spring is at its busiest so I had to hurry back the very evening the conference ended.

I’m already hearing a lot of people excited about Copenhagen in 2025 so I anticipate it will be a very wellattended and fun conference. See you there!

At closing ceremonies the voting delegates (representatives of the official member organizations of Apimondia) voted on the location for 2027, and the winner is … Tanzania! There were official pre-tours and technical tours after the conference, and at the past conferences I’ve found those to be very fun and worth going along with, but I currently live in Aus-

Kris Fricke is the “beekeeper-in-chief” of Bee Aid International, www. beedev.org, and also runs Great Ocean Road Honey Company in Victoria, Australia.

E. Suhre Bees Package Bees available April and May Queens available April through October For information, pricing or ordering call Eric (530) 228-3197

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