SR 
On September 15, we awarded certificates of successfully completed theoretical and practical training to this year's participants of the third generation of the BeeConnected beekeeping school. On that occasion, in Nova Iskra Dorćol, Ekonaut also gathered the students of previous generations who finished the program of the beekeeping school in 2019 and 2020, as well as this year's students of the "Biljarnica" school of plant knowledge. This year we had an extremely great interest of potential participants and with the support of the City Secretariat for Environmental Protection we provided subsidized training for unemployed people who want to start beekeeping through the project "City Gardens, for city bees".
This year, we introduced a novelty, so some of the participants who could not attend the practice due to great interest were enabled to follow the theoretical classes online. Also, one of the novelties of this year's program is that, in addition to experienced lecturers and demonstrators in practice, prof. Dr. Mića Mladenović and Slađan Simonović, this year we included an experienced beekeeper Stanko Rajić from the Belgrade Association of Beekeepers as a demonstrator in the program. The participants had the opportunity to work in the apiary and asylum of the association in Košutnjak, in addition to the apiary in New Belgrade, which is placed on the roof of the socially responsible company "Kreativa Unlimited" and thus experience working in different conditions and get another mentor as support in their first beekeeping steps.
As a special event for the end of the official theoretical training, we organized a lecture on bee products "Everything you wanted to know about propolis and had no time to ask" in collaboration with Dr. Petar M. Ristivojević, a scientist from the Faculty of Chemistry, University of Belgrade who works in the Laboratory for Food Authenticity Testing, specialized and certified for testing the quality of honey. In addition to working in the laboratory and with students, he has dedicated his doctoral and scientific work to innovative applications and new ways to dissolve this resinous substance, which we know as propolis and which is considered the strongest natural antibiotic. This property of propolis is very important if we know that medical antibiotics are used uncontrollably today, which leads to the formation of superbacteria that are increasingly resistant to medical antibiotics, resulting in increasing mortality from infections and inability to resist antibiotics known to us. During the lecture, the audience received a broader picture of the history and application of this bee product, which has been used in natural medicine for thousands of years and is still widely used today. It was a special pleasure to hear at the end of the lecture and the presentation of others. Ivana Stojiljković, a chemist by profession employed at the Faculty of Forestry, who at the end of the lecture shared with the audience several extremely useful and easily applicable recipes based on propolis, which can be made at home. The entire lecture will soon be publicly available on Ekonaut's YouTube channel.
After the lecture, we had the opportunity to try different kinds of honey that some of our students of all generations produced in their apiaries, successfully applying the knowledge they acquired during the training at the BeeConnected beekeeping school in one of the last three years. Thus, we had an exceptional opportunity to try, in addition to Belgrade honeydew, sunflower honey from Vojvodina and acacia honey from this year's student from Republika Srpska. On that occasion, Professor Mladenović demonstrated and explained how honey is tasted and which characteristics of honey are monitored and evaluated when its quality is determined at fairs and competitions.
By the end of the year, Ekonaut will organize two more popular science lectures that will be open to everyone and take place online, on the topic of domestic biodiversity of bees and insects. This way, in addition to future and current beekeepers, we want to warn as much interested public as possible about the disappearance and endangerment of insects, especially pollinating insects, on which plant pollination depends in the largest percentage. The cycle of life in nature continues by pollinating plants. They are also extremely important for people because whether we will have food on the table tomorrow depends on successful pollination.
If you are interested in bee products, but also in how the quality of honey is examined in the laboratory, you can watch the lecture we organized last year called "Secrets of bee products" as a public part of the beekeeping school, which was held by prof. Dr. Mića Mladenović from the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade and prof. Dr. Dušanka Opsenice Milojković from the Faculty of Chemistry.
