Smart Technology Could Save Dwindling Bee Populations

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Statistics Service, honeybees generated nearly 163 million pounds of honey in 2016. With the cost of honey around $2.08 per pound, that amounts to more than $339 million.

Honeybees, which produce six hive products, including honey, pollen, royal jelly, beeswax, propolis, and venom, used for numerous nutritional and medicinal purposes, are also incredibly important as crop pollinators, accounting for about $15 billion in added crop value.

Unfortunately, as a result of a widespread bacterial disease called foulbrood, caused by spore-forming bacteria, entire colonies of honeybees are being endangered despite being controlled by three antibiotics approved by the FDA. As a result, global honeybee populations are in decline, threating the world’s food supply.

Thankfully, new smart technologies could prevent the threat of extinction. Technology startups have been developing smart devices that grant beekeepers access to comprehensive information about the health of their hives in an effort to reduce losses and improve bee health.

ApisProtect in Ireland, has launched a sensor that alerts beekeepers if problems arise in their hives. The tiny internet-connected sensor is placed under the roof of the hive and measures metrics such as temperature, humidity, sound and movement. The data is sent via the cloud to ApisProtect’s HQ in Cork, Ireland, where it is processed, analyzed and sent back to the beekeeper.

“Using our device, beekeepers are going to be able to keep many, many more hives for the same number of workers, and the same amount of spend on things like feed and treatments,” Fiona Edwards Murphy, the company’s founder and CEO, says. “They’re going to be able to dramatically increase the amount of pollination and honey output that they’ve got in their operation.”

ApisProtect, which had $1.8 million in funding from global investors in 2018, works with 20 beekeepers across the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa to track the activity of up to 20 million honeybees. The data collected from the 400 smart sensor units has resulted in a detailed database of global bee health.

Yet beekeepers don’t simply maintain hives to produce honey and other hive related products. They also lease their hives to farmers who need bees to help pollinate their crops. The commercial bee industry is key to the production of countless crops, including almonds, broccoli and apples.

For most farmers, one hive per acre is usually enough for most crops, however, high value crops or those in harsher climates may need more hives per acre to ensure that the fruit or nut set will be high since bees are less disposed to emerge from their hives when the temperatures drop below 50˚ F, when winds blow faster than 20-25 mph, or when it is raining.

California, which produces 80% of the world’s almonds, depends on crosspollination between trees and requires more than 2 million beehives each year to complete this task. However, climate change, corporate farming, and the use of pesticides has decimated the world’s bee population and commercial beekeepers in the US have lost 44% of their colonies in 2019, according to research from the University of Maryland.

As a result, there has been a growing demand for smart technology solutions that help safeguard bee populations. One startup, Pollenity in Bulgaria, founded in 2015 by Sergey Petrov, has raised $1.2 million in funding. Its Beebot smart sensor is currently aiding with six universities from across Europe on a project called HIVEOPOLIS, which works to improve the health of bee populations using a variety of technologies, including a robot bee, able to “dance” to direct the hive’s swarm.

“The robot bee will tell the other bees where to go to find nectar and pollen,” Petrov says. “Not only will this direct them to certain fields for pollination but will also navigate the bees away from dangerous areas, like where pesticides are being used.”

Petrov says they are also working on technology that can detect if a bee has been poisoned by pesticides. “If we don’t harvest the technology to work in our favor, we might as well just give up, and I’m not giving up,” he says.

As an example of how bees are helping US farms thrive, in 1997, California almonds covered less than 500,000 acres. Nowadays, almond orchards cover more than 1,330,000 acres, producing more than 80 percent of the world’s supply. This growth is due in large part to successful crosspollination efforts. Nearly, 85 percent of all commercial colonies in the US visit California’s almonds.

According to Dr. Jay Evans and Dr. Gordon Wardell, members of the American Beekeeping Federation, bees ensure the success of an almond crop, therefore, almond growers have a vested interest in preserving the honeybees’ health and working with the scientific community “to find [agricultural] methods that are safe for honeybees.”

by Mark Lugris