The world’s largest science-driven initiative aims to address alarming bee declines by expanding smart hive monitoring, advancing research, and encouraging cross-collaboration between industry stakeholders.
BeeHero, the global leader of data-driven precision pollination, announced today the launch of “The Global Million Hives Network”, the largest science-driven initiative of its kind dedicated to addressing bee population declines.
By 2030, The Global Million Hives Network will create the most substantial database of bee behavior, empowering governments, researchers, and stakeholders worldwide in a global effort to monitor pollinator health, drive innovative solutions, and promote education and policies to create lasting change for bee welfare, food security, and agricultural sustainability.
Global food production and ecosystems face instability as an unprecedented pollinator health crisis continues to unfold. About 75% of food crops depend on pollinators, bees primary among them. Yet in the U.S. alone, bee mortality rates in commercial hives have soared to over 60% in the past season, with alarming declines reported worldwide. This threatens the security of the global food supply, as well as the biodiversity and sustainability of agriculture at large.
The Global Million Hives Network will contribute to the work being done by the numerous existing, important initiatives to promote bee health by providing a scope and breadth of data and research that was previously unavailable. The initiative aims to achieve its goals through three core pillars designed to tackle the most pressing threats to bee populations. Firstly, the initiative will expand hive monitoring from more than 300,000 smart hives monitored by BeeHero to 1 million hives, focusing on high-risk countries and priority agricultural regions. This will expand the range of data BeeHero collects on bee health and behavior across different geographic markets and crop types to get a holistic understanding of hive patterns and trends, including the spread of diseases.
The second focus will be leveraging the data collected from The Global Million Hives Network’s unique infrastructure to glean insights on bee health and behavior to benefit agricultural, scientific, non-profit organizations, and governmental stakeholders worldwide. BeeHero is committed to growing the world’s largest and most comprehensive bee health dataset, with the goal of increasing the existing 25 million data points collected daily from hive and field sensors to 100 million daily signals. This comprehensive database will enable tracking mite infestations and disease patterns, as well as observing correlations between pollination strength and crop yield forecasting.
The Network’s third pillar will be education and outreach. Partnerships with governments, NGOs, and agricultural bodies will drive science-based pollination policies and research while advocacy efforts will encourage stronger regulations on biodiversity-friendly farming.
“The inevitability of the bee loss crisis and the importance of early visibility into hive issues is precisely why we founded BeeHero, where we use our technology to put ‘eyes’ in hives that enable beekeepers to mitigate problems. With the current high rates of hive shortages and colony loss, the ripple effects are too profound to ignore, impacting beekeepers, growers, and the wider global economy,” said Omer Davidi, CEO and Co-Founder of BeeHero. “We are proud to launch this ambitious, collective effort to secure the future of pollinators and global food systems worldwide as we are tasked with producing more with less. We already have the technology– what we need now is the collaboration between private companies, governmental organizations, the scientific community, and caring individuals to overcome this challenge to safeguard the global food supply.”
BeeHero is the world’s largest provider of Precision Pollination as a Service (PPaaS). Operating across five continents, the company deploys IoT in-hive and in-field sensors that track bee health, activity, and environmental conditions in real time. BeeHero’s AI-driven analytics deliver unparalleled actionable insights into bee colony health, pollination efficiency, stress factors, and other indicators, enabling beekeepers and growers to improve bee welfare and increase crop yield and quality. BeeHero has received numerous prestigious industry awards, including recognition as one of TIME’s 100 Best Inventions of 2024 and one of the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies.
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