Apimondia 2025
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Over 8,000 beekeepers, from all over the world (representing 1441 countries), all came together the last week of September for the 49th world beekeeping congress, Apimondia. There we listened to over 300 presentations from leading international experts, mingled among the 216 booths in the expo exhibiting the latest products and technology, and discussed everything on our minds about beekeeping with old and new friends from around the world.
For those of us coming from Australia it is of course always a difficult time of the year to get away, occurring at the height of spring and swarming season (67 made the trek though!). On top of that, Copenhagen isn’t close to Australia! It took me 26 hours, 45 minutes, to fly there with layovers in Bangkok and Munich (AU$2,289.24 round trip). On arrival I was struck by how pleasant and mild the weather seems to be anywhere that isn’t Melbourne. I could go out without a jacket or multiple layers!
Central Copenhagen consists of blocks of elegantly aged, picturesque 5-story apartments with shops on the first floor, connected by roads with very little traffic because the bike lanes are used extensively. The side-
The famous Nyhavn ("new harbor") waterfront, one of numerous very beautiful sights in Copenhagen (Photo by Ashton Edgley)
walks are smoothly cobblestoned and you’re always within a block of a bakery selling delicious pastries. If you’re in the historic area there are frequent canals, castles, and ancient towers with tall copper-green spires.
until the following Saturday, with usually four or five simultaneous sessions of presentations going on at one time. The sessions covered everything from apitherapy to marketing and economics (and of course everything in between), with the individual sessions arranged thematically, which aided one in choosing whole sessions to sit in on rather than having to run back and forth between halls.
The conference center (Bella Center) was just a 15-minute ride on the clean and easy-to-navigate metro from the city center. The conference went from opening ceremonies on Tuesday evening (September 23)
Apimondia 49 was held at the Bella Center, the second largest exhibition center in Scandinavia.
Ashton Edgley
Using a QR code to website menti.com, forum moderators were able to poll the audience live on what their main concerns were. It's worth pointing out that if "yellow-legged hornet" and its Latin name Vespa velutina were combined, it would be a solid second after varroa.
Bee health was of course a major topic and the category of sessions I mostly attended. The major themes I detected, as distinguished from previous Apimondias, are that the Tropilaelaps mite now has our full attention, and everyone everywhere still considers varroa the primary threat to their bees, with interest now focusing on organic miticides and breeding for resistance. Yellow-legged hornet is by now established across Europe, and while it’s still a major concern to Europeans I felt like I heard less about it than two years ago. Similarly, small hive beetle doesn’t seem to be spreading significantly from the one location where it is established in southern Italy, though they don’t believe it is possible to eradicate it from there. I didn’t make it to any honey adulteration-related presentations but this has been an ongoing serious concern throughout the world.
One presentation I found particularly interesting was by Canadian Maxime Franco with Nectar Technologies, which ran a statistical analysis2 comparing 16 different factors from miticide treatments to weather in relation to the mortality of 103,477 hives tracked from 2020-2023, and rather surprisingly found that air quality was the single factor of greatest impact on hive mortality. My first thought about air quality was industrial pollution, but of course the most significant impact on air quality comes from wildfires, which are only expected to increase in frequency with climate change.
Another particularly interesting presentation for me was the Swedish Agricultural University (SLU) presentation on their famous “Bond method,” or “Live and Let Die” resistance program on the Swedish Island of Gotland, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Insights and trends from a 20 year natural selection experiment.” This project is often cited by the many people very eager to just let varroa rip in order to develop natural resistance, but they pointed out that the population of colonies in the study area was reduced by about 90% by 2003 … and never did bounce back. Ever since then the numbers have held steady at about 10% of the levels they had been at prior to the mass varroa die-off. They caution:
And one other specific presentation I’ll highlight: I’d heard a rumor early on that someone was revealing a new way to quickly find and catch queens, which obviously can be useful for caging them to make brood breaks for oxalic treatments. We speculated maybe it had something to do with a pheromone lure? I wasn’t really expecting much, it sounds like someone’s wishful thinking. Well it turned out to be surprisingly simple! The “magnetto” device is a sort of magnetized wand; they put a little metal chip on the back of the queen similar to existing methods of putting a marker on her, and by merely slowly passing the magnetized wand along the brood frames there’s a gentle metallic clink and there she is stuck to the wand, from whence she can be easily removed and placed in a cage. Apparently they’ve been testing this out in the field and it really works. I don’t think it’s publicly available yet, but if this sounds good to you, look out for it in the future.
The growing trend of “natural” or treatment-free beekeeping, when advocating for minimal intervention to improve bee health, is an oversimplification of natural selection processes, at the cost of high mortality rates.
A “global honey bar” was set up across several long tables in the central breezeway, hosting over 250 honeys from 42 countries. I foolishly waited for the line to diminish which never actually happened, the popular opportunity to taste honeys from around the world attracting 3,000 tastings per hour throughout the conference!
Evolution through natural selection does not always guarantee improved prospects for long term survival ...
Successful treatment-free beekeeping is possible but requires diligent and well-educated beekeepers.
It should not come at the cost of healthy bees and healthy ecosystems.
The expo filled an acre and a half of one grand hall, with 177 exhibitors and 44 trade stalls — all kinds of companies, organizations and na-
We should consider a more holistic view, perhaps IPM management.3
A slide from "The 'Bond' Project" in Gotland shows that in 20 years the hive numbers never did make the recovery they'd hoped for.
tional groups showing off their latest equipment and services, and always, always, everywhere you looked, people having a great time talking with each other about all things bees.
Part of the fun of big conferences like this is seeing old friends, especially if you’ve been in the industry for a long time and all over the world. I ran into someone I first met in Tanzania in 2014, someone else from western Ethiopia 2012, and Dr. Sue Cobey who taught me instrumental insemination back in 2011 in California. The conference officially declared an “official pub” in central Copenhagen, which was actually a great idea because rather than being dispersed all over the city many of us all ended up in the same place every evening. I also organized what I hope will be a new tradition getting the editors of various bee magazines around the world together for dinner – Mea Mc- Neil represented the American Bee Journal and it was lovely to meet her.
Usually a major undercurrent of the conference is the competing bids to host the next-after-next conference. The next one in 2027 will be in Dubai (Tanzania won the vote last time but their venue won’t be finished in time — perhaps they’ll try for a later date), but the host location for 2029 was to be chosen this time. There was only one contender, which made things a bit less suspenseful — in 2029 Apimondia will be hosted in Leipzig, Germany.
I always enjoy the technical tours associated with Apimondia. In this case I actually ended up on an unofficial technical tour with a Finnish group that had chartered a bus all the way from Finland (via ferry across the Baltic), visiting various beekeeping-related sites along the way, and they had room for a few more to join the 33 of them on their bus the day after Apimondia ended.
different Zealand, a Dutch province). There we arrived at the Buckfast queen-rearing operation that Keld Brandstrup ran for many decades (he’s in the process of handing it over to one Mogens Mundt).
Keld had been a teacher, until one Friday in the early 1970s while he was drinking white wine with a friend on the porch they heard a buzzing noise, a swarm! “You’re going to become a beekeeper!” his friend informed him. He wasn’t quite so sure but he did put it in a hive box. After a few years of losing most of his colonies every winter
We drove about an hour west to the central-west of Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen is located (New Zealand is actually named after a
"No video, I don't want to show up on YouTube! But you can take pictures." Danish queen breeder Keld Brandstrup tells us about his operation.
he decided he should get more serious about it and corresponded with Brother Adam in the U.K., who invited him to come over to talk to him about it, so he did, in 1975. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, which may have seemed very odd, the monk being friends with “a long haired hashesh smoking guy like me,”4 but somehow it worked. In 1978 he brought his first Buckfast queens from Brother Adam’s U.K. operation back to Denmark. Today he says 80-90% of the bees in Denmark are Buckfast bees.
“It’s a piece of cake to produce queens, but not so easy to make good queens,” he says. Denmark is the only country in the world with legally protected breeding areas, according to Brandstrup. He is able to do his breeding on three islands where no one else is allowed to have bees. They have a 60-day queen-breeding season.
They used to have real problems with nosema but they decided they’d never breed from a hive that had any signs of nosema and that eliminated it entirely after a few years. I asked if they tried to do anything with varroa resistance and he said no, they just treated with flumethrin in August and oxalic in January. “The most important thing about varroa is to stay on top of it. If you get behind you’ve already lost.”
Shortly later a Danish extension officer told me that sadly this has been the attitude in Denmark, just treat with the chemicals by the calendar.
When asked about the future, he said due to climate change they’re going to have to breed bees that can withstand higher temperatures, and “we only have three breeders in all of Europe and we’re all the wrong side of 70.”
Next we went to the nearby property of Danish extension officer Flemming Vejsnæs who had many hives enrolled in all sorts of experiments, which we had fun seeing. His property had a sort of mystic quality of being walled in by thick forest but itself was full of flowering gardens with the beehives here and there throughout, altogether giving the feeling of being in an enchanted glen — one in which enterprising gnomes are hooking all kinds of technological innovations to beehives!
Finally we proceeded to the alsonearby headquarters of the Danish Beekeeping Association, which shares a very nice building with some other agricultural associations. There they laid out a genuine Danish smorgas-
Danish extensionist Flemming Vejsnæs's very well-monitored bees
bord for us that was very delicious. Fellow extensionist Geoff Williams of Auburn University and I enjoyed poking around the extension office there and looking at the numerous informational booklets that look very good, though they’re in Danish!
pollinators.” Communications Earth and Environment (2025)6:126 https://doi. org/10.1038/s43247-025-02082-x 3. Grander, B.L., (2025, Sept 26th) “The Good the Bad, and the Ugly: Insights and Ternds from a 20-year natural selection experiment on disease resistance in Gotland, Sweden” [presentation] 49th Apimondia Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark 4. Brandstrup, K., (2025, Sept 28th) [presentation to group of Finns] Sorø, Denmark
Altogether we had a very lovely time in Copenhagen and at Apimondia. The Scandinavian beekeepers were incredibly welcoming and friendly, and the city was beautiful, safe, comfortable and full of sites of historical interest. All the beekeepers I’ve asked for feedback about the conference have said it was great and they learned many useful things. I strongly encourage you to consider attending a future Apimondia conference.
Another 27 and a half hours via Vienna and Bangkok and we were back in Melbourne pushing through freezing sideways rain to find our car in the airport carpark.
Kris Fricke, originally from Southern California, is formerly Editor of The Australasian Beekeeper, and currently Senior Varroa Development Officer in the Australian state of Victoria.
Just a few days later, on October 2, Jeff Pettis formally stepped down as president of Apimondia after six years in that role, citing doctor’s advice and obligations to family. He had begun volunteering with Apimondia in 1999 and his leadership of the organization has clearly been very well thought of.
References 1. The number mentioned at closing ceremonies was 121 but an official letter that came after, mentioning Jeff Pettis' resignation, said 144 countries were represented. 2. Coallier, N., et al., “Poor air quality raises mortality in honey bees, a concern for all
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