BeeHero, a data-driven precision pollination company, says it has expanded its Pollination Insight Platform, which launched last fall, to the apple industry to provide apple growers with actionable and data-driven insights into pollination in the orchards.
“Apples are very sensitive for on-time pollination,” said Itai Kanot, co-founder and chief growth operator for BeeHero. “You have a very short window in which you want to get all the king bloom, queen bloom and you don’t want to get a lot more than that because then you have a lot more thinning, which is extremely expensive.”
Kanot said along with ensuring the right amount of pollination, spring is often a difficult season for pollination, where bees are sensitive to cold, cloudy days; inconsistent weather makes it difficult for apple growers to understand how effective pollination truly was in the orchard. He said many growers believe 10 days is a sufficient amount of time for a hive to work in an orchard.
“If it’s too cold, if it’s rainy, if it’s windy, pollinators are not going to be able to fly around and pollinate efficiently,” Kanot said. “You really need good weather in order to see that high-level activity out in the field and it becomes a guessing game of, ‘Did I get enough pollination, should I leave the hive maybe a little longer because it was a cold season,’ and so on and so forth.”
BeeHero says its sensors can help the grower determine the optimal bloom time to deploy hives. Then the PIP will track pollinator behavior in the orchard through sensors spread throughout to track activity. Kanot said growers who deploy the PIP will be able to set benchmarks and track exactly what parts of the orchard got the necessary activity to properly fertilize the flowers which will lead to good fruitset.
“We’re measuring a bunch of different parameters, but one of the main ones is sound,” he said. “We’re looking at the sound signature of a bee pollinating a flower, and we can do it not just with bees, we can do it with some other pollinators too. We’re able to differentiate between a bee just flying by and a bee going into the flower in order to pollinate it.”
Kanot said the PIP tracks bees per minute in an aggregated number in a day and over a week. He said this will help the grower understand what good pollination and high-quality pollination looks like.
“If you know that you need a certain amount of bee trips during the season, once you see on your platform that you have reached that number, regardless of the weather, you know it’s time to get the bees out,” Kanot said. “We can also help growers understand whether they have enough bees on their field because we create those heat maps where they can see the visitation patterns of the bees, and whether or not they get good coverage for the entire orchard.”
Kanot said this can help growers understand where to best deploy hives and potentially reduce the number of hives needed to pollinate in the future.
“With pollination, it’s really hard to see the results in such an immediate way,” Kanot said. “A lot of growers say, ‘I’ll let the beekeeper tell me what they think is right and follow that.’ And that can be a good thing, but in many cases they also say, ‘I’ve been doing the same thing for forever, I’ll just keep doing the same thing.’ It’s easier than starting to investigate and understand more about bees. What we do is we actually bring the data and the information in a quantifiable manner, on a dashboard in real time, so the growers can actually see the difference and the actual results.”
