June 8, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

From apples to almonds to alfalfa grown for cattle feed, every year crops valued at $20 billion depend on bees, which also produce $150 million in honey every year, for survival. 

It’s widely known that bees have been having a hard time of it for decades. There has been a widely tracked and steady decline in honeybee numbers due to a phenomenon that has come to be known as colony collapse disorder that manifests as:

~ The sudden disappearance of a large percentage of worker bees from a hive.
~ Very few dead bees in the proximate area to the colony.
~ The queen and young bees (brood) remaining in the hive with ample honey and pollen, yet destined to die because a hive cannot support itself without worker bees.

This phenomenon may have been happening for longer than was originally thought. Between 1947 and 2005 the honeybee population in the U.S. plummeted by more than 40 percent, with a third of the losses happening over the winter months, far outpacing the usual loss rate of 15 to 20 percent for a healthy bee colony.

The rate of loss continued to escalate, until in 2019 U.S. beekeepers lost 40 percent of their colonies – equal to the loss calculated between 1947 and 2005 – over a single winter, reflecting the worst winter losses ever recorded. 

There are a number of factors that researchers believe are contributing to colony loss, including pesticide usage (particularly neonicotinoids, which have been proven to disrupt a bee’s memory and ability to navigate), climate change, parasites and mites (Varroa destructor), and loss of habitat and biodiversity.

The problem has been identified, tracked, and studied, but the exact cause of colony collapse disorder remains somewhat elusive – leaving tech-driven startups to develop alternative solutions to this intensifying threat.

One such startup is Israel-based Arugga, which has just raised $4 million in pre-Series A funding led by Cresson Management, and supported by Terra Venture Partners, Equicelar, Biobest Group, Smart Agro, and other unnamed investors. 

Founded in 2017 by CEO Iddo Geltner and VP of business development Eytan Heller, Arugga is developing a viable robotic alternative to bumblebee pollination or the tedious and labor intensive manual pollination methods employed in indoor greenhouse production models.

The company is currently launching its prototype robotic pollinator module – called TRATA – which uses a combination of cameras and artificial intelligence to identify flowers on greenhouse tomato plants that are ready for pollination. The unit then uses an air nozzle sprayer system to shoot a calibrated pulse of air onto select flowers to replicate buzz pollination of certain species of bees. Moving along a pipe rail, the system advances down rows of tomato plants repeating the process.

After successful trials in Israel, the company is beginning trials in Australia (chosen because the country does not have bumblebees) where Arugga hopes to disrupt the $900 million per year greenhouse tomato industry, which currently relies on pollination by hand.

“Around the world, pollination in greenhouses is typically performed using commercially produced bumblebee hives, but these bees don’t pollinate well in certain conditions, and they’re actually banned in Australia,” Geltner told ABC Rural.

The company’s pollination tech is currently being used at the Costa Group’s greenhouse operation in Guyra, New South Wales, where each tomato flower has to be manually pollinated by touching the stem to vibrate the plant, shaking pollen onto each stigma – a labor-intense system that raises the cost of production by about $25,000 per hectare,  Jonathan Eccles with Protected Cropping Australia explained to ABC Rural. 

This technology is also appealing to growers in the U.S. and Canada where there are not only issues with pollinator die-offs, but concern over diseases being spread to crops from bees.

“There is some fear among growers in the U.S. and Canada from tomato brown rugose fruit virus being spread by bees,” said Heller. “Several large growers in North America are now looking at alternatives. But when considering manual pollination, it is expensive and inefficient, and we are seeing quite significant added yields for our robots versus manual pollination.”

In the future, the company will be looking to conduct further trials in the U.S. and Canada, continue with the development of its robotic solutions, and will be looking to use the capital from this round to expand its team with additional R&D, marketing, and customer support members. 

“We are most likely to get started [Series] Round discussions with investors later this year,” said Heller. “Primary purpose [of that fundraising] it’s about accelerating market penetration and releasing additional modules.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.