As growers face mounting challenges from pollinator decline, agtech company BeeHero says it is taking a data-driven step to turn the tide.
BeeHero co-founder and CEO Omer Davidi says the launch of The Global Million Hives Network is the largest science-driven initiative of its kind dedicated to addressing bee population declines.
Global food production and ecosystems face instability as an unprecedented pollinator health crisis continues to unfold. About 75% of food crops depend on pollinators, bees primary among them. Yet in the U.S. alone, bee mortality rates in commercial hives have soared to over 60% in the past season, with alarming declines reported worldwide. This threatens the security of the global food supply, as well as the biodiversity and sustainability of agriculture at large, Davidi says.
“BeeHero started as a company that’s trying to connect the dots between the bee crisis and the pollination needs of global food production, and we develop sensors that go into beehives and allow us to work very closely with beekeepers to introduce better pollination,” Davidi says.
“[As the company has grown], we kept seeing 40% mortality rates year over year among commercial beehives, working with scientific organizations, universities, governmental institutions — kind of the day-to-day stuff. This year, we all woke up one day around January and realized that this is a different year.”
Davidi says the 40% mortality rates, according to beekeepers, are now closer to 60% to 65%, with some reporting more than 75% mortality rates.
“These numbers raised a red flag that it’s a national security issue, broader than it being tough to be a beekeeper or farmer. It was at that point that we started to get inquiries from scientific organizations, government organizations like the USDA, and so on, trying to gather more information. Because if there’s something specific that we see having hundreds of thousands of hives that we track and monitor, 24/7, for many years, it’s the data that’s been happening this year,” he says.
The crisis needs to be addressed globally for it to make a difference, Davidi says.
“Exceeding 60% mortality rates this year in the U.S. is not just a U.S. problem, and we don’t know whether this is a single year thing or that’s now the new norm of mortality rates,” he says. “We’ve had inquiries in the past from regions in France experiencing more than 85% of mortality rates. So, there’s a global issue that needs to be addressed from a global perspective. We cannot try and solve the problem in specific geographies and hope for the best.”
To address the crisis, by 2030, The Global Million Hives Network aims to create the most substantial database of bee behavior, empowering governments, researchers and stakeholders worldwide in a global effort to monitor pollinator health, drive innovative solutions and promote education and policies to create lasting change for bee welfare, food security and agricultural sustainability, according to a news release.
The Global Million Hives Network will contribute to the work being done by the numerous existing initiatives to promote bee health by providing a scope and breadth of data and research that was previously unavailable. The initiative aims to achieve its goals through three core pillars designed to tackle the most pressing threats to bee populations, the release said.
Firstly, the initiative will expand hive monitoring from more than 300,000 smart hives monitored by BeeHero to 1 million hives, focusing on high-risk countries and priority agricultural regions. This will expand the range of data BeeHero collects on bee health and behavior across different geographic markets and crop types to get a holistic understanding of hive patterns and trends, including the spread of diseases.
The second focus will be leveraging the data collected from The Global Million Hives Network’s unique infrastructure to glean insights on bee health and behavior to benefit agricultural, scientific, non-profit organizations and governmental stakeholders worldwide.
Davidi says BeeHero is committed to growing the world’s largest and most comprehensive bee health dataset, with the goal of increasing the existing 25 million data points collected daily from hive and field sensors to 100 million daily signals. This comprehensive database will enable tracking mite infestations and disease patterns, as well as observing correlations between pollination strength and crop yield forecasting.
The Network’s third pillar will be education and outreach. Partnerships with governments, NGOs, and agricultural bodies will drive science-based pollination policies and research while advocacy efforts will encourage stronger regulations on biodiversity-friendly farming.
“The inevitability of the bee loss crisis and the importance of early visibility into hive issues is precisely why we founded BeeHero, where we use our technology to put ‘eyes’ in hives that enable beekeepers to mitigate problems. With the current high rates of hive shortages and colony loss, the ripple effects are too profound to ignore, impacting beekeepers, growers, and the wider global economy,” Davidi said. “We are proud to launch this ambitious, collective effort to secure the future of pollinators and global food systems worldwide as we are tasked with producing more with less. We already have the technology — what we need now is the collaboration between private companies, governmental organizations, the scientific community and caring individuals to overcome this challenge to safeguard the global food supply.”
