Monitoring honey bee hives by hand is passé. The buzz these days is about high-tech sensors inside hives. They help commercial beekeepers keep colonies healthy and allow bees to keep doing their jobs as one of the world's most important pollinators. ApisProtect, an Irish agtech company, recently closed a $1.8 million seed round of financing to expand internationally, and plans to open its first U.S. office in Salinas, California.
ApisProtect provides real-time hive monitoring powered by satellite-enabled sensors retrofitted to existing beehives. The technology means beekeepers can more effectively manage colonies, and don't have to rely on periodic, manual hive checks that can allow disease, pests and other issues to deteriorate hive health, says ApisProtect co-founder and CEO Fiona Edwards Murphy.
"Periodic checks can miss the hives with problems," said Murphy, Ph.D. "You can have two hives next to each other and one will be fine, while the other has severe problems. For operators with thousands of hives, manual spot checks can’t hope to catch all the issues."
The expansion funding came from venture capital investors Finistere Ventures and Atlantic Bridge Capital, Radicle Growth, the Yield Lab and Enterprise Ireland. The new American office will be at the Western Growers Association's WG Center for Innovation and Technology.
ApisProtect already monitors the health of more than 6 million honey bees in 144 hives across Europe and North America. The company plans to increase this number to more than 200 units (9 million bees) by the end of this year, by outfitting 20 apiaries (bee yards) across the U.S., Ireland, the U.K and South Africa.
The technology collects data on temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sound and movement from a single sensor unit installed inside the hive.
"We collect data from beehives all over the world using a combination of different long-range networks to bring these data together on our servers," Murphy said. "There, we use 'Machine Learning' technology to process and convert overwhelming amounts of raw data into actual information a beekeeper can use."
The data is simplified with alerts like “these hives are sick” or “this hive has no queen," rather than long graphs of information. "This allows beekeepers to use the beekeeping skills and knowledge they already possess in a much more effective manner ... to maximize pollination and honey yield," she said.
Bees are about more than delicious honey and fears of getting stung. They contribute about $174 billion (U.S.) worth of pollination to the agri-food industry a year, playing an essential role in global food production. A third of all the food we eat depends on pollinators like the honey bee. There are 91 million managed beehives worldwide. However, U.S. commercial beekeepers experienced declines of 38% of colonies in 2015-2016 due to a number of environmental and biological factors.
California, where the new office will be located, is the home of commercial pollination, Murphy says. "It’s both where this industry was created, and where it remains most valuable globally, due to the scale of the almond industry, which is almost totally reliant on honey bee pollination."