RCR Cristalleria Italiana’s Biodiversity Project, in collaboration with the Siena Food Lab Foundation and the University of Siena’s Santa Chiara Lab, has begun, leading to the hosting of a number of bee families at the Colle Val d’Elsa production site. The bees will also serve as a biological indicator of the goodness of industrial processes and the surrounding area.
Last May, RCR Cristalleria Italiana formally entered into an agreement with the Siena Food Lab Foundation and Santa Chiara Lab of the University of Siena (UNISI) to launch a project to support Biodiversity in the areas surrounding the Colle Val d’Elsa (SI) production site.
The “Intelligent Beehives” project involves the installation of two hives already populated by bees at the Colle Val d’Elsa production site, one of which will be equipped with sensors to collect various environmental parameters. Indeed, bees, which are recognized as excellent bio-indicators, offer valuable information on the quality of the air and the surrounding ecosystem, as their stable presence is linked to healthy and pollutant-free environmental conditions. Through biomonitoring, it will be possible to monitor the health of the colonies, which will serve as biological indicators of the environmental impact of the company’s industrial processes.
The initiative is very important, because it is linked to RCR’s strategy that “doing good for people and the environment is good for business”-said Roberto Pierucci, CEO. Bees act as a biological indicator in a global sense and are a living guarantor of the goodness of our operations, as well as the absence of excesses in the use of pesticides by farmers in the area. We say that our new hosts will be valuable allies in RCR’s ESG strategy. We care about biodiversity, being sensitive to environmental issues is part of our way of doing business, so we are happy to welcome these very special guests. Sustainability for RCR has always taken on the meaning of Responsibility; their presence and thriving I think is the best possible certification of the goodness of our industrial processes.”
Bees are essential to biodiversity because they pollinate many plant species, contributing to the reproduction of wild plants and typical crops such as olive trees, vines and fruits of the Tuscan landscape. This supports the balance of ecosystems and sustainable agriculture, which is essential for land protection. However, bees are threatened by alien species such as Varroa, a parasite now widespread throughout Italy, and Vespa Velutina, a predator that has arrived from France as far as Florence and Lucca, damaging colonies and the entire agricultural and beekeeping production. The activity of the two families of bees, supervised in situ by expert beekeeper Nicolò Patrone, will also be constantly monitored remotely by the Siena Food Lab Foundation and the Santa Chiara Lab of the University of Siena, which will process the data collected at the RCR site, comparing it with that of all the other connected sites, gathering information useful for the processing of the global project’s final data.
Thus Cristiana Tozzi, Project Manager Santa Chiara La and Fondazione Siena Food Lab: “The mission of the project is to support research and innovation in the agri-food sector, providing integrated services, accelerating the digitization of agri-food systems and their efficiency, traceability and sustainability, and promoting the reliability of products and processes and of the information provided to citizens, local authorities and stakeholders. We are happy to inaugurate a new partnership with an important company in the area such as RCR that will enable the project to find new designs for the Sienese territory“.
For the purposes of the project, the University of Siena has globally purchased 20 beehives accompanied by the necessary accessories to create a real open-air laboratory, providing all hosts with the sensor instrumentation functional to monitoring the health status of the bees and the simultaneous monitoring of the state of the environment surrounding the hives. “This project will not only help us, but we intend to help raise awareness among local people, institutions, and schools about the importance of biodiversity in our territory, which is devoted to agriculture, where, for example, the misuse of pesticides is still a big problem,” Pierucci concludes. So we are considering the possibility of involving local institutions to organize public and school visits.”
