About us
Who we are
Apis socialis is a bee that only survives as a colony. We took the name because everything we work on holds together the same way, or not at all.
We are a Greek non-profit working on pollinator health, biodiversity and community resilience across Greece and the wider Mediterranean. We were founded in Athens in 2019 by beekeepers, ecologists and farmers who were tired of watching the same problem be studied and never funded.
The mission
We work to keep pollinators alive in landscapes that people actually use — olive groves, grazing land, roadside verges, the edges of towns — and to keep the people who share those landscapes able to make a living in them.
The vision
A Mediterranean where a bee can cross a valley without running out of forage, and where the farmer, the beekeeper and the municipality who made that possible are all better off for it.
You cannot ask a farmer to leave a strip unploughed for the bees and then fail to show up in August when the well runs dry. It is one bargain, or it is nothing.
What we actually do
Four lines of work. They only make sense together, which is more or less the point of the name.
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Habitat
We plant and defend continuous forage — corridors, verges, field margins and burned ground — agreed field by field with the people who own it.
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Monitoring
A volunteer census counts pollinators to one fixed protocol in five regions. The dataset is open, and it is the only reason we can say what is working.
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Livelihoods
Small grants, shared equipment and training for beekeeping cooperatives, so that keeping a landscape alive is also a way to earn a living from it.
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Advocacy
We take the evidence to municipalities and to the ministry in plain language, and then we go back the following year, and the year after that.
None of this is done by an office
Several hundred people give a weekend, a field, a van or a bench in a laboratory. Both routes in are open, and both of them matter.