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You would possibly consider beekeepers as mere honey producers, however they’re a part of a rising commerce the place they lease their hives to farmers who want bees to pollinate their crops.
The industrial bee business supplies pollination companies value tens of billions of {dollars}, and is essential to the manufacturing of an enormous vary of crops, together with almonds, broccoli and apples. California, for instance, produces 80% of the world’s almonds, and for that to occur, pollen must be transferred between bushes. Each 12 months, greater than 2 million bee hives are required to do the job.
Now, expertise startups are creating smart units that give beekeepers entry to detailed details about the state of their hives, aiming to cut back losses and enhance bee well being.
Among them is Ireland’s ApisProtect, which has simply launched a sensor that alerts beekeepers if there’s a downside of their hives.
The small internet-connected sensor is positioned underneath the roof of the beehive and measures numerous metrics together with temperature, humidity, sound and motion. Data from the sensor is shipped through the cloud to ApisProtect’s HQ in Cork, Ireland, the place the knowledge is processed, analyzed after which despatched again to the beekeeper.
“Using our device, beekeepers are going to be able to keep many, many more hives for the same amount of workers, and the same amount of spend on things like feed and treatments,” says the firm’s founder and CEO, Fiona Edwards Murphy. “They’re going to be able to dramatically increase the amount of pollination and honey output that they’ve got in their operation.”
Since receiving $1.eight million in funding from worldwide traders in 2018, the firm has been working with 20 beekeepers throughout the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa to observe the exercise of as much as 20 million honey bees.
The info collected from the 400 smart sensor models is making a database of world bee well being, powering the algorithms that analyze its knowledge.
Bee tech
With bees in demand for a booming pollination business, there are a selection of different startups selling new applied sciences, together with Pollenity in Bulgaria, Arnia in the United Kingdom and BeeHero in Israel.
Pollenity was based in 2015 by Sergey Petrov and has raised $1.2 million in funding. Its Beebot smart sensor system is aimed toward small and hobbyist beekeepers, and it’s also working with six universities from throughout Europe on an EU-funded analysis mission known as HIVEOPOLIS.
The mission goals to enhance the welfare of bees by reinventing hives utilizing numerous applied sciences, together with a robotic bee able to “dancing” 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 also navigate the bees away from dangerous areas, like where pesticides are being used.”
Petrov says there are additionally plans to construct expertise to detect whether or not a bee has been poisoned by coming into contact with pesticides.
For him, securing the way forward for the honey bee is certainly one of the world’s biggest challenges. “If we don’t harvest the technology to work in our favor, we might as well just give up,” he says, “and I’m not giving up.”
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