May 22, 2024

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

BeeHero’s mission as explained by company CEO Omer Davidi is “…to deliver pollination accountability for commercial crop growers, by leveraging big data analytics and machine learning to help them mitigate pollination risk. Thus allowing them to focus on producing more food, securely, and sustainably.”

Bees are our critical partners, safeguarding human well-being and the success of our agricultural production systems. They are a key component to food security, with one out of every three bites of food we eat being dependent on the work they do as pollinators. They ensure biodiversity, healthy ecosystems, and human nutrition, with 75 percent of the world’s fruit and seed crops dependent, at some level, on natural pollination for continued production.

BeeHero’s Precision Pollination as a Service platform enables commercial beekeepers to remotely and precisely track and monitor each colony collecting unprecedented audio and biological data that is then analyzed utilizing AI-powered algorithms. The results provide beekeepers the ability to better manage their hives and to take proactive and preventative actions, removing ambiguity, guesswork, and inaccuracy from the pollination process while lowering colony mortality in the process. 

For this work, the company has received widespread recognition including receiving an Honorable Mention by Fast Company’s 2024 World Changing Ideas Awards in the agriculture category, Cleantech Group’s 2024 Global Cleantech 100 list, the 2024 Founder’s Games for social impact, CNBC’s 2023 Disruptor 50 list, and The New York Times’ 2022 Good Tech Awards.

And as World Bee Day was May 20, precision pollination leader BeeHero has provided us with groundbreaking insights gained throughout the 2022-2024 almond pollination seasons.  

In recent months, the company has reinforced its position as the world’s leading provider of precision pollination as it surpasses 300,000 hives under management, from which the company records more than 25 million hive samples each day. 

Using its cutting-edge sensor technology and AI-powered analysis, the company has revealed bee flight hour and bee-frame insights, and analyzed data from previous almond seasons to show that BeeHero-managed hives demonstrated a higher degree of effectiveness with an average of nearly 50 percent more bee-frames per hive compared to the industry standard.

This activity translates into stronger colonies and enables BeeHero to optimize hive placement, reducing the number of hives needed per acre in almond orchards and resulting in enhanced pollination at a lower input-to-output ratio for growers. 

BeeHero also discovered a sizable difference in the average daily bee flight hours (BFH) measured by its sensors compared to traditional BFH calculations, accurately recording 5.9 BFHs daily, almost double the conventional 2.7 BFHs recorded over the 2022 and 2023 almond pollination seasons. 

The company explained that this revelation underscores the accuracy of its technology over traditional calculations, which underestimated the actual flying time of bees due to a reliance on and proximity to local national weather stations, affecting industry crop yield predictions. Taken together, this finding and BeeHero’s ability to create stronger hives indicate the widespread implications for not only almond producers, but for other seed, row, and specialty crops as well. 

Further, during the 2024 season, BeeHero utilized multiple proprietary tools to extract its unrivaled dataset on bee behavior and pollination efficacy and introduced its Deployment Planning Tool enabling beekeepers to visualize their almond orchards and strategically plan daily tasks for optimized results. Additionally, its Hive Tracker offered growers real-time insights into hive shipment and placement, while their new mobile grower platform provides farmers with seamless access to their hives’ frame counts and other critical information and data. 

“We are excited to be consistently achieving new, pivotal milestones on our mission to transform pollination efficiency through transparency and data-driven precision,” said Omer Davidi, CEO and co-founder, BeeHero. 

“Our findings showcase the critical nature of robust data in optimizing pollination activities, and our unique ability to provide previously unknowable insights – and as a result, stronger hives and more accurate yield predictions – to industry stakeholders. We look forward to continuing to reshape industry paradigms, empowering growers and beekeepers to better foster bee welfare and bolstering productivity for greater profitability.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and Agtech Intel News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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