Most food crops rely on bees, and precision pollination firm BeeHero works with beekeepers and growers worldwide to enhance bee health, increase pollination efficacy, and improve crop yields.
The Packer recently interviewed Itai Kanot, BeeHero’s chief growth officer and co-founder, about the background and vision of the company.
The Packer: Can you give a little background on your company and developments in the last year? What are you excited about in terms of your services and kind of how the industry is getting to know what you offer?
Kanot: BeeHero was founded in late 2017, and we started working for the first time in the U.S. at the end of 2018. Our first serious commercial pollination season was almonds in California, in February of 2020, right before COVID.
BeeHero is a precision pollination company. We use tech to essentially improve the entire process of pollination, to make it more efficient, more predictable, more reliable and data-driven. We bring transparency and accountability into this industry, [which] really doesn’t have a lot of it.
A normal pollination provider brings hives into the field based on a certain amount [of pollination needs] that were discussed with the grower, and there’s not a lot of [transparency] for growers.
Growers today know exactly what kind of inputs are going into the ground or on their trees. They know how much water they’re irrigating with, they know how much they spray, and they know their yields. They know everything to a very precise measurement. But with pollination, it’s a lot of guesswork. A lot of growers don’t really know how many bees they need to cover their crop, and then they don’t really have an understanding or any visibility into the process itself.
What we do for the grower is provide a very clear dashboard that offers quite a lot of information, which is unprecedented. There’s no other way to get that information, and they can see exactly how strong their hives are. They can see their activity levels and so on, and it brings not just transparency, but accountability, because with a normal pollination contract, the grower might bring a third-party inspector to come and look at the hives and just tell them if the hives are good or not. These [third-party inspectors] usually look at maybe 10% of the hives. At that point, there’s not a lot that you can do [if there are problems with the hives.]
You might, as a grower, potentially not pay the full amount that was discussed if the hives are not great, but in many cases, by the time you finish inspecting, the bloom is already in significant progress. You can’t really change anything at that point.
So, you can maybe pay less, but you’re stuck with what you got. With our [service], we have visibility into the hives year-round. We’re able to pick and choose the right hives for the specific acres. It’s like a matchmaking process that we do to make sure that the grower gets exactly what they paid for. It is important for us to do it with really strong hives, because stronger colonies are better pollinators.
Economies of scale really work in a beehive. For example, during a pollination season, each of two six-frame hives alone will visit 500,000 flowers on average. But two six-framers together will do about 2.8 million trips, meaning the pollination power is vastly stronger together.
A frame of bees really is calculated as one frame inside the hive that is 75% covered with bees — that will be considered a frame of bees.
Two hives with six frames together are going to do about a million trips during pollination season, and a 12 framer is going to do, on average, 2.8 million trips.
So, it is the same amount of bees, but almost three times as many trips, just because it works in a more efficient way.
We really put a lot of emphasis on finding those really strong hives and bringing those into the field for the pollination season, so that our growers can get the best service available.
And of course, they get full transparency into the entire process, and they know what they’re getting. We know if there’s an issue, they know if there’s an issue. And we’re able to supplement or do whatever is needed before it’s too late, just because we have all the data.
Bees are used on such a wide variety of crops. How many different types of applications, in terms of crops, does your company work with?
Our main focus in the early days of BeeHero was almonds in California, but we’ve expanded since then quite a bit. We’re doing almonds in California, we’re doing almonds in Australia, and then we’re doing other crops as well.
We do a lot of vegetable seed production. We do apples, pears, cherries and different berries. We do blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, avocados, canola seed, and we started dealing a little bit with macadamia down in Australia as well.
We have crops where we have a bit more traction than others, but we’re expanding now. And you know, we just simply want to become a very important part of the food production industry as a whole. So, we’re not limiting ourselves to only this or that crop.
Obviously, we go where it makes sense in terms of — do they really need us? Can we actually provide additional value? Can we generate revenue? Those are things that need to be taken into consideration when we’re approaching a new market, but generally speaking, we’re not limiting ourselves to specific crops.
BeeHero has connections to Israel and obviously other countries as well. You see this being used in Israel and Europe even, or what is your main market?
The company was founded in Israel; my co-founders and I are Israelis. My personal background is beekeeping. My family owns the largest beekeeping operation in Israel, and so I grew up beekeeping in a relatively big commercial operation dealing with honey production and a lot of pollination. I came with a lot of understanding and the right background for what we’re doing. And then my co-founders are coming from a more technological background, and they bring that part to the table, and that is how it originally came together.
BeeHero doesn’t own any bees. We believe that we cannot compete with our suppliers. We don’t want to compete with our suppliers. We are also, by definition, a data-driven tech company, so we provide the technology and data around everything that we do, everything that drives the service that we provide.
We have our show hives outside our office, but other than that, we don’t own bees.
All the bees are owned by professional beekeepers that have been vetted by us, whom we’ve been developing very close relationships with over years of working together. That’s the way that we work currently, in terms of working in Israel and in Europe. We do some work already, both in Israel and in Europe. We currently offer two different products. One of them is what I described until now, and which we call precision pollination as a service (PPaaS).
And then we have a newer product that we launched a little over a year ago, which is the Pollination Insight Platform in-field monitoring solution. With PIP, what we do is we spread sensors in the field, on the trees, on the bushes, in the flowers, and these sensors are able to really monitor the actual pollination activity of not just bees, but really any pollinator on the flowers themselves.
Essentially, there’s a very different sound signature for a bee pollinating versus a bee just flying by, and we’re able to pick up that sound signature and really count the amount of visitations. We provide a metric that’s called BPM — bees per minute — and the grower can see the actual activity on the flower. This is really important when your field has competition.
For example, if you grow onion seeds, you need to pollinate onions. At the same time, potentially, there’s a citrus orchard that is blooming close by. Citrus is a lot more attractive for the bees than the onions. So, in many cases, the bees are not even going to try and pollinate your onion field, and you as a grower already paid all that money to get your bees in, but the bees are not working your field. This is something that you really need to know, because you want to know if you’re going to get a crop or not.
In a scenario like that, the insights our PIP solution provides are actionable. There are things that you can do to still improve your situation, but you need to know that this is what’s going on in your field, because anything that you do to improve your pollination is going to cost you more money, and before you spend that money, it’s better to have good insights about the actual pollination activity and pollination performance.
We’re able to identify a bunch of different pollinators, not just bees. We can identify carpenter bees, little mason bees, hover flies, bumblebees, and of course, honeybees, and these are all beneficial for our growers. A lot of them have native pollinators where they grow their crops, and they don’t exclusively rely on managed bees that they rent to get sufficient coverage. But they do rely on them, as well as the native pollinators that they have.
We’re generally able to provide them a clear picture of what is actually going on with the flowers in their fields or orchards. We’ve done a lot of it in vegetable seed production so far, and we’re doing it in Europe and in Israel and in the U.S. and now in Australia.
What are one or two things you’re talking about at trade shows or at industry events? What’s your main messages and, as you look ahead, what are your areas that you can look for growth for your company?
The pollination industry is huge. There’s a lot more room to grow. We just started with apples and blueberries, and there’s a lot more ground for us to cover there. I think that the more we talk to growers, the more we realize how much in most of those industries, there really aren’t very clear best practices about what you need to do in order to get good pollination in your fields.
In most cases people just do whatever their dad did before them and their grandfather did before them. Sometimes they don’t necessarily question the standard or legacy methods, but sometimes it’s about not even knowing that they don’t know something, because you don’t know what you don’t know.
In many cases, they don’t even have people they can ask questions. They don’t have this person that can tell them, for your application, what you need is this and that. As a result, I think that in many cases, growers actually spend more money than they need to. They can probably get better performance for a similar or even a cheaper price.
With the way we do things, we don’t rent hives per acre; we actually rent bee frames per acre, because it’s a much more precise measurement, and because we have sensors in every one of our hives, we are able to know exactly how many frames of bees are in every single hive.
We know how many frames of bees we bring per acre, so we can be a lot more accurate with that and really provide the grower with the precise service for their orchard, for their needs. In many cases, a grower might have three or four or five or 10 different orchards, and every one of them is going to have a different mix of varieties, pollinizer trees versus main crop trees. They might have different microclimates, and they might have different soil properties, and all those things are also going to affect different bloom stages and how many bees you actually need.
Just using one metric for everything is not necessarily the best way to go about things, because in some cases you might be underpollinating and in some cases, you might be overpollinating. We really try to bring that precision to maximize that part of making a crop. There are so many moving parts and so many things that affect the yield of your orchard at the end of the season. This is one of the things in the process that most growers just don’t really have a good grasp on. With our technology, they can get a lot more precise, a lot more accurate and really understand what they are doing.
When you onboard a new beekeeper, I suppose that’s not like an overnight thing, correct? Does it take a while for them to put in place all the tech and software platform that they need?
Absolutely. When a beekeeper signs with us, we send them enough sensors for their hives. They go through the hives about once a month, either way, and they just take a bunch of these sensors with them in the truck. And when they open the hives, they just slip one of those sensors into every one of those hives. It’s a pretty simple process, especially because you don’t have to do it all the time. You do it once, and the sensors’ battery lasts for many years. They don’t need to take them out to replace the battery every few months or not even once a year.
Once the sensors are in the hives, the beekeeper also gets access to our platform. Obviously, everything is accessible on a mobile app as well, and they can get an idea of what’s going on in their different bee yards, from wherever they are, whenever. Anytime of the day, they can log into their app and take a quick look over their different bee yards, and it helps them as well with the day-to-day management, making sure that they see all the issues very early before they become real problems. As we all know, it’s a lot easier to prevent an issue than to fix it, and in many cases, that is something that our system can provide.
I am curious on how the demand is driven. Is it driven by the newly equipped beekeepers, or do the growers that use the pollination services pull the demand in? What’s your role in all that?
It’s a bit of everything. We have growers who come to us because their neighbor has been using us and liked it and have been sharing their experience. Then they’re interested enough to pick up the phone and give us a call. Then we have beekeepers that want to work with us, because we’ve created a kind of a win-win-win situation where the beekeeper, BeeHero and the grower all have the same interest, and our position is better together. When the hives are stronger, the beekeeper makes more money, BeeHero is able to generate better margins and the grower gets better pollination.
So, a lot of our beekeepers, they start with a portion of their outfits, a portion of their hives with us. After working with us for a year or two, in some cases, beekeepers often want to bring their personal contacts and growers that they’ve been pollinating for over a certain period of time, and they want to bring them on board with BeeHero and keep servicing growers, but through our platform, which is really great.
Then we have our own sales team that goes out, forms relationships, gets new business all the time. We actually just opened a location in Washington [state], specifically in Wenatchee. We work in Wenatchee and Yakima, where we’re needed, but we hired a team there, which we’re very excited about. Obviously, we have a team in Australia. We have a big team in California, and we go out and spend time with the growers. We go to different meetings and events and spread the gospel; it is always challenging, but hard work is always the secret sauce.
