The Israeli company BeeHero, a world leader in precision pollination, today launches "The Global Network of One Million Hives." This is a scientific initiative dedicated to addressing the global bee crisis. By 2030, the network is expected to generate the largest database on bee behavior, enabling governments, researchers, and stakeholders around the world to engage in a global effort to monitor pollinator health, develop innovative solutions, and promote education and policy to create long-term change for the benefit of bees, food security, and agricultural stability.
BeeHero focuses on one of the key strategic challenges facing global agriculture: the need to increase crop yields amid a steady decline in the number and effectiveness of pollinators—primarily bees—responsible for pollinating 75% of the world's crops. To address this crisis, BeeHero has developed two groundbreaking, complementary products: an IoT device installed inside hives to monitor them in real-time, and a second device placed in fields and orchards to monitor the quality of pollination on-site. These devices help beekeepers maintain strong, healthy bee colonies, which are rented out to farmers during the pollination season and help them maximize pollination processes in their fields.
The global bee crisis has worsened significantly in recent decades, due to a variety of factors related to climate change and over-industrialization. Recently, a new low was recorded, with bee mortality rates in commercial hives in the U.S. reaching over 60% last winter, with similarly alarming declines in other parts of the world. This mortality threatens global food security, biodiversity across vast regions, and the stability of agricultural industries in many areas.
Three Areas of Activity
The Global Network of One Million Hives joins a variety of important initiatives and organizations working to protect bees, adding a new layer of massive scientific data that was previously unavailable. The new initiative will operate in three main areas of activity: First, it will expand the monitoring of hives globally from over 300,000 smart hives currently monitored by BeeHero to one million, focusing on countries where bee health is at high risk and which are important agricultural regions. Expanding the monitored hive network will broaden BeeHero’s database on bee health and behavior to new regions and crop types, thereby helping to holistically understand patterns and trends in hives, including disease spread.
The second area of activity is maximizing the data collected from the network to generate insights into bee health and behavior for the benefit of agricultural stakeholders, scientists, NGOs, and governmental entities around the world. BeeHero already collects data signals daily from the hives it monitors, and by 2030 this number is expected to grow to 100 million signals per day. This will create an unprecedented database that will enable tracking of pest spread and disease patterns, as well as discovering correlations between pollination quality and yield prediction.
The third area of the network's activity is education and public awareness. BeeHero is currently working on forming partnerships with governments, environmental and non-governmental organizations, farmer associations, and researchers to promote science-based policy and research in the fields of pollination and pollinator protection.