How technology can help protect bees and aid beekeepers

In his TED Talk, “A plea for bees,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a leading apiarist, said bees pollinate and indirectly pollinate about one-third of the food in the U.S. To illustrate this point, he shared a photo of his breakfast, followed by one where he removed everything impacted by bees. It was a stark contrast.

The presentation by vanEngelsdorp focused on the challenges affecting both the beekeeping industry and the fresh produce industry, which relies greatly on pollinators such as bees. These include varroa mites, colony collapse disorder and, unfortunately, hive theft.

It’s in addressing these challenges that technology companies such as BeeHero hope to help improve efficiencies and offer beekeepers and produce growers insights into the hives deployed to pollinate.

In this "Tip of the Iceberg" podcast episode, BeeHero co-founder and CEO Omer Davidi said he founded the company to help those in the industry better understand their hives.

“We develop technology that helps to mitigate those gaps between what we see with the beekeeping industry and the pollination needs,” he said. “It's a low-cost sensor that goes into an existing beehive, so understanding the complications of the beekeeping domain and the commercial environment.”

Colony collapse disorder is damaging for beekeepers, causing up to 40% hive mortality a year, which has a broader effect, Davidi said. BeeHero helps monitor temperature and humidity within the hive so beekeepers can get a better picture of hive health and deploy that data to better predict issues.

“As the environment changes, we create a lot of stressors that eventually affect the hive,” he said. “That requires beekeepers to be more thoughtful and maybe even adjust the way they are used to operating their business so they can survive in this environment.”

Davidi said BeeHero works with beekeepers year-round and offer farmers a precision pollination service. Farmers, thanks to BeeHero’s technology, understand a hive’s activity in their orchards or fields.

Davidi said a challenge to developing technology like BeeHero is that farming isn’t a sterile environment like a laboratory, so there’s a critical need to build technology solutions to withstand Mother Nature.

“When you go out to the field and there's mud, there's rain,” he said. “It’s messy out there, and you still need to create something that is robust enough and solid enough to work in those conditions and does not affect the way that people operate their business.”

Davidi said hive tracking helps beekeepers in the unfortunate situation of hive theft.

“It wasn't the core aspect of what we're trying to do, but if we can support beekeepers to handle theft as well, it's a good thing to do,” he said. “We hope that people seeing those sensors on the hives will understand that you don't want to steal those they are tracked.”

Davidi said tracking can help beekeepers in other ways, too. He said one beekeeper said the BeeHero map showed a hive in an orchard, but the beekeeper was adamant that his team removed all the hives. Using BeeHero’s precise tracking, the beekeeper found 10 hives in a location his team had forgotten about.

“Sometimes just forgetting the hives in the field could be a devastating thing because those hives will not survive in a farming environment all year long,” he said.

Listen to this podcast episode in the player above, on your favorite podcast platform or by checking out this link.