Apiculture: A challenge for the modern range management

Τhe natural pastures of Greece constitute important grazing places for domestic and wild animals, they have crucial environmental, aesthetic, ecological, touristic etc. importance and are used for grazing from millions of bees, producing valuable for the economy of Greece products. Lately the number of the beehives has doubled. This is also due to the demographic changes in the mountainous areas of the country. In order to ascertain the preferences of the bees in plant samples of honey from 40 beehives in the area of Sithonia where analyzed. It was discovered that the greatest part of pollen in the samples derives from, families of rangeland plants while the dominant colors of the flowers was yellow, blue-violet and white-yellow. This particular preference or ability of vision of the bee towards these colors is possible to create positive or negative sequences in the landscape. The presence of the new european beehives with dominant the yellow and the blue color, aesthetic doesn’t fit to the landscape. Because of the fact that the development perspectives of apiculture are auspicious it is necessary to organize the research towards this direction, as well as special administrative studies to estimate the bee-carrying capacity of the range landscapes in order to avoid negative sequences, and the appropriate apiarian species in reforestations or other revegetation activities.