August 11, 2020
By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media
Isareli smart beehive developer Beewise Technologies Ltd. has raised $10 million through a round led by Fortissimo Investment Fund. Also participating in the round were Micheal Eisenberg, the co-founder of the VC firm Aleph, lool Ventures, Atooro Fund, and ARC Impact.
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.
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 on an annual basis.
However, in recent years 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.
~ 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.
Stepping back and taking a longer view, this 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 health bee colony. This shifted in 2005 when beekeepers reported more losses over the summer months than the winter for the first time.
The situation continued to escalate today, as colony collapse, climate change, and poisoning from agri-chemicals, among other factors, take their toll on global bee numbers.
Founded in 2018 by Saar Safra, Hallel Schreier, Eliyah Radzyner, Yossi Sorin, and Boaz Petersil, Beewise began retrofitting shipping containers to create Beehome – a solar-powered, AI-driven closed system that contains about 40 bee colonies, (representing about 2 million bees) and uses robotic arms, sensors, computer vision, and software that allow a keeper to manage their hives remotely, in real time, and upload the data to a dashboard.
Beehome can monitor for pests and employ precision application of pesticides where needed. The company also stated that it used thousands of images to train one of its machine learning platforms to detect bees with varroa mites, and to independently decide if a quarantine of the affected hive is required.
And the system can also determine if certain hives are ready to be harvested, and will extract the honey, notifying the manager when 500 gallons has been harvested.
“Farmers and other food producers are very concerned about the fact they’re not getting their pollination,” said Saar Safra, CEO, Beewise. “They reach out to us because they see how … bee colonies thrive in our device, and they want us to work with their beekeepers … Beewise is not reinventing beekeeping; all we are doing is allowing beekeepers to apply the same treatments they are applying in the field today but in real time and with a lot more data and effectiveness.”
Saving our pollinators is so critical to the future of our entire food system that Beewise is not the only agtech startup to apply cutting-edge technology to beekeeping.
A few months ago, another Israel startup, BeeHero, which is also developing its own AI-driven platform that allows for the remote management of hives, raised $4 million in Seed funding from a group of investors including Rabo Foods and Agri Innovation Fund, UpWest, iAngels, Plug and Play, and J-Ventures.
Outside of Israel is Ireland-based ApisProtect – an emerging company that presented at the AgTech Nexus 2017 Start-Up Hub in Dublin.
This company started by preeminent researchers, including CEO Dr. Fiona Edwards Murphy, uses the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor honeybee colonies via real-time hive monitoring powered by satellite-enabled sensors that are retrofitted to existing beehives.
The company then applies proprietary big data and machine learning techniques to convert the raw data collected into valuable information and actionable insights for beekeepers.
“For the last 20 to 30 years, bees have been facing problems that they never experienced before in history,” Edwards Murphy told GAI News in June 2019. “Our technology is helping the beekeeper apply the knowledge that they already have, but in a much more effective and controlled manner.”
Edwards Murphy continued, “This will enable commercial beekeepers to reduce their colony losses. For example, in the U.S. in 2015-2016, colony losses of up to 38 percent were reported. With our science-based technology, we can reduce these losses and help beekeepers manage the health of their colonies.”
– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com
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