Hive Mind: Keeping An Eye – And Ear – On Billions Of Bees

By John Jeffay, NoCamels September 26, 2023 5 minutes

Healthy hives are critical to pollination of crops, and ensuring the world has enough food (Courtesy)

Beekeepers have a sixth sense. They listen to the buzz of their hive and instantly know the health of the bees.

That’s fine if you have just a handful of hives. But bees are big business and big bee companies typically have thousands or tens of thousands of hives.

Farmers rent them as they need them to ensure their crops are pollinated (technology has yet to create a truly viable alternative to bees).

Relying on the instincts of a time-served beekeeper to flag a problem with the winged insects isn’t an option, which is where BeeHero comes in.

Beekeepers sense the health of the bees from their buzz, but can’t keep an eye on thousands of hives (Courtesy)

The Israeli company, founded in 2017, leads the world in monitoring beehives, and is the largest provider of pollination services globally.

It’s also among 20 of the Startup Nation’s top innovators, which have been chosen to represent the country at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference that starts in the UAE at the end of November.

Its tiny in-hive sensors – about the size of an AirPods case – saved the lives of a quarter of a billion bees in 2022.

The sensors act as a pair of eyes, ears and more right inside the hive, relaying real-time information on the health of the bees and warning of any issues that need attention, such as extremes of temperature or the demise of the queen bee.

BeeHero’s sensors can reach the places that human beekeepers cannot (Courtesy)

The sensors collect a vast array of data, including sound, light, temperature, vibration, humidity and GPS location.

Artificial intelligence identifies any concerns and the system alerts the farmer on their smartphone or other device.

BeeHero’s customers are the farmers whose crops will fail if they’re not properly pollinated.

They rent hundreds or even thousands of hives for the critical weeks when they require bee pollination for their orchards of apples, avocado, cherries, cucumbers, squash or just about any other crop.

If the hives are sick or depleted, the bees can’t do the job properly. Pollination accounts, by the way, for 80 percent of total bee business. Honey production is, by comparison, a sideline.

Eytan Schwartz, VP Global Strategy at BeeHero, says almost half (48 percent) of all hives in the US are lost every year, but many of the bee deaths could be prevented. Farmers working with BeeHero report a loss of just 27 per cent.

Schwartz says that the company offers monitored hives and precision pollination as services, and by providing the exact number of bees needed, in the places where they’re needed, farmers have certainty into the pollination process.

“We analyze the size of their field, the type of crop, the density of the crop, the season, the weather, the shape of the field, and so on,” he says.

“What’s happening unfortunately today is that farmers all over the world are ordering bees for pollination, renting maybe 10,000, maybe 50,000 hives, knowing that some of them will arrive on their fields empty. So essentially they’re paying for a product they’re not getting.

“Worse, they’re not getting the pollination they need and they’re losing the entire yield in that area.”

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In-hive sensors relay real-time data on the health of the bees (Courtesy)

Monitoring beehives on such a large scale, and with such precision, is arguably the biggest disruption ever to hit a traditionally conservative business sector.

“The only innovation introduced into beekeeping in the last centuries was the invention of the motorized vehicle to transfer hives,” says Schwartz.

“I think what is very, very unique about BeeHero is the understanding our founders had a few years ago that there must be a way to apply Big Data, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence into a legacy industry that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.”

Schwartz says that the founders began to experiment with hive monitoring systems, highlighting the strong backgrounds of co-founder and CEO Omer Davidi and CTO Yuval Regev in technology, cybersecurity and Big Data.

“Itai Kanot, our COO, is a second-generation beekeeper born on the largest private apiary in Israel, owned by his father,” he adds.

“Every year, he saw how the hives were weakening. At the same time growing up on a moshav, an agricultural community, he saw how innovation was being introduced to many other fields, how tractors were driving almost on their own, how smart irrigation and fertilization were improving yields.

“He was the only kid on the moshav whose father was still doing things the way generations before him had been doing it.”

BeeHero sensors warn of problems so beekeepers can intervene (Courtesy)

Kanot and his fellow founders embraced emerging technologies to create the simple plug-and-play unit that currently sits unobtrusively inside 220,000 beehives across the world.

BeeHero is far from the only hive monitoring system on the market. But most are aimed at the hobby beekeepers who want to increase their honey yield, rather than the pollination business, says Schwartz.

Their devices tend to be rather expensive, he says, and therefore not very scalable to thousands of hives.

Bees are critical to global food security. Albert Einstein famously said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Twenty years ago, scientists identified “colony collapse disorder” among US bees – caused by a combination of modern agricultural methods, climate change, new pesticides, new mites and parasites into the ecosystem, large fields of only one type of crop, the lack of water and other resources.

A device outside the hive uploads new data to the cloud. Courtesy

BeeHero is at the forefront of addressing the critical issue of global bee health, so it’s not hard to understand why it’s been selected to attend COP28.

“We are thrilled to be representing Israel at COP28 and to take part in one of the most important global endeavors to address climate change,” says CEO Omer Davidi.

“Being selected for this honor demonstrates that our efforts to secure the global food supply are not only recognized, but truly pioneering.

“We look forward to participating in the dialogue and to continuing to leverage nature’s data to enhance bee welfare and create a more sustainable agriculture landscape.”