BeeWise has invented a new kind of beehive that can help prevent colony collapse – which is threatening pollination across the world
Ruti Levy Mar. 16, 2021 11:56 AM
Eliyah Radzyner, 36, has been fascinated by bees for a long time. He began raising them in his backyard while studying at the Hebrew University’s Agriculture Faculty, and afterward he worked at an apiary in northern Israel. His day would begin at 4 A.M. “Beekeepers need to take advantage of all the daylight hours to understand what’s happening in all their hives,” he explains.
The modern beehive – that is, the kind managed by humans – is a wooden box that was designed 170 years ago, in which one grows a colony. The bees in the hive live in honeycombs, which are natural hives that they build themselves and which have thousands of hexagonal cells. But these beehives, Radzyner quickly learned, were essentially “black boxes;” you couldn’t know what was going on inside them without opening them carefully and examining them.
A commercial apiary has thousands of hives, scattered in various spots. The Yad Mordechai apiary, for example, has hives on the Golan Heights, while a beekeeper in California can have hives as far away as North Dakota. The beekeepers travel to tend to each of their hives, but can only sample a small portion of them in each region to decide how the entire area should be handled.
Hive care varies by season. There are seasons when new hives are created; there are times when the hives must be fed because there are no flowers to meet the demand, and there are those moved around to provide pollination services for crops.
‘Colony collapse’
However, the biggest challenge, says Radzyner, is to plan for the unexpected: “I simply never know what I’m actually going to find inside the hive,” he says. “There’s an estimate based on the season and the previous visit, but every time I’m in the field there’s another surprise.”
The biggest surprise that he’s referring to is what is called “colony collapse,” and it’s expressed in two ways. Either the bees abandon the hive without leaving a trace, or the beekeepers find tens of thousands of dead insects. “We return with boxes of dead bees. It’s very sad,” says Radzyner.
Colony collapse disorder is a worldwide problem that has intensified over the past 20 years. More than 35 percent of bee colonies collapse annually. There are various theories regarding the source of the phenomenon: Solar radiation that drives the bees crazy; parasites or insecticides, and climate change. Because bees are critical to food supplies, the damage from colony collapses is estimated at tens of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone.
Radzyner realized that something about the way beekeeping is done was illogical. If a beekeeper could get to a hive pre-collapse, they might be able to save the bees. If the condition of each colony could be known in real time, beekeepers could save the time now wasted on traveling and logistics and instead use it to utilize their expertise.
Radzyner channeled this insight into a startup called BeeWise, which was launched in 2018. A mutual friend introduced him to Saar Safra, 43, a tech entrepreneur who had just then returned to Israel after 15 years in Seattle and six startups. Safra agreed to manage the company. During the first several months, they took on three other tech people; Hallel Schreier, 39, a PhD in applied mathematics, whose specialty is biological models, is the company’s chief scientist; Yossi Sorin, 36, an industrial designer by training, is the system architect, and Boaz Petersil, 36, an expert in machine learning, is the artificial intelligence chief. Radzyner, as the agronomist and beekeeper, is the product manager. The company now employs 35 people.
BeeWise built a smart box, called a BeeHome, divided into sections. It can house 24 hives (a total of 720 honeycombs) and monitor them regularly. This monitoring is done by a robotic arm that photographs each hive frequently, down to every last hexagonal cell in every honeycomb. This remotely operated robot sends photos to the beekeepers with its analysis
The beekeeper’s response to the photos help teach the robot’s algorithm how to interpret similar photos in the future. The robot already knows, for example, to interpret a pattern of egg-laying so as to identify when a hive has lost its queen bee; to send out an alert about a hungry hive or to close all the box’s openings when it senses approaching pesticides. There are also diseases that beekeepers can identify by looking at the larvae, and the robot, if asked, can spray antibiotics, harvest honey and change the hive temperature.
“It’s not just identifying and discovering problems in the hive,” says CEO Safra. “It’s also treatment. Because if I were to tell you that in hive 38 in section 5 there’s a disease, you would have to drive several hours to get there. The fact that I can treat most things remotely changes the whole picture.” The company boasts an average 10 percent mortality rate in their hives compared to an average 35 percent in managed hives.
BeeWise seeks to move the experienced beekeeper out from the field and into the office. Last year, Time Magazine ranked BeeHome among the 100 best inventions in the world.
The bee’s knees
The success of BeeWise and companies like it could have considerable impact on the lives of all of us. Bees are responsible for most of the world’s abundance. They pollinate 75 percent of crops like vegetables, fruit, coffee, cocoa, almonds and cotton. Safra notes that at this stage, “the infrastructure of global agriculture is still mostly based on people in white suits moving boxes from place to place. That seemed unreasonable.”
The agricultural product most identified with bees is, of course, honey, but most bees are actually managed by humans for commercial purposes and are used to pollinate various crops by special order.
In the United States, Radzyner says, hives move around. BeeHome, therefore, must be constructed to be on the move. Over time the company reduced the number of hives in each unit from 40 to 24, to make the container smaller and easier to transport. Solar panels were also added so that BeeHomes could operate in open fields where there are no electricity connections.
Safra himself was amazed at what he’d learned about bees and beekeeping. A honeybee colony is a matriarchal social organization, in which there is one queen who births thousands of descendants, the female worker bees who do all the work. They never sleep, and die from exhaustion after a few months. Living alongside them are a couple of hundred male bees who basically do nothing. “The males don’t have the special pocket in their hind legs to collect the pollen, and they can’t even sting,” he says. “Their sole job is to mate with the queen bee, and after they complete this task they die, if they haven’t been thrown out before then.”
Bees are also very important to the ecosystem, and many scientists view them as a measure of the health of the environment. If there is a sharp drop in the population of wild bees, one can conclude that the environment in which they live is at risk. Bee products also have medicinal qualities; there’s honey, pollen, Propolis, beeswax and even bee venom that helps those with Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and systemic infections (this field is known as apitherapy).
Save the bees?
Over the past two years BeeWise has placed dozens of BeeHomes all over Israel, but it’s only recently that it introduced a commercial version for which it is starting to charge money. Over two years it had signed deals with 50 American clients who manage 300,000 hives – but the coronavirus has delayed the delivery of their hives abroad. Each BeeHome is sold for a one-time fee of $2,000, with a $400 monthly charge for a subscription for the program that manages the hives, which comes to $17 per hive. BeeWise has a standard contract that can be viewed on its website and it doesn’t take any additional fees for delivery, installation, or removal.
Their typical client operates thousands of hives with a turnover of anywhere between $10 to $15 million annually. In Israel, the business potential is much smaller – as most beekeepers in Israel have only 3,000-5,000 hives – “in the U.S. some beekeepers have more hives than Israel has overall, but it served as our testing ground and we have no intention of leaving,” Safra says.
Among their first clients was Dvir Gross, who runs “Avocado Beit HaEmek”, who operates orchards in a kibbutz in the Western Galilee. BeeWise’s first commercial model can be found in his fields, where it will stand until the end of the avocado season. Gross used to pay for pollination services for his avocado and lychee crop from three different beekeepers. Now he’s a partner in one of them as they move to buy BeeWise’s smart hives. “I need to make sure of something I could never have had certainty in – that every part of my field is pollinated in the best way possible.”
“Beekeepers have worked the same way for so many years, some of them are also very old at this point and BeeWise also helps teach them as part of the installation process. At some point, some of their knowledge is accumulated within the machine and the overhead will go down over time,” Gross says.
BeeWise claims an average 30 percent increase in honey production from hives using its tech for two years. They also claim a 19 percent increase in pollen quality and a 43 percent decrease in labor costs. The company has raised $38 million and received $3.1 million in grants. It currently produces tens of new hives every month – though they need to cross into the thousands to be in the green, and for that they will need much more capital.
“BeeWise’s vision – even at the deck level – causes a lot of excitement, but still have you ever heard of someone investing in bees? It’s not so simple to explain a startup using both deep-learning tech and biology. It scares investors.”, Says Safra.
The bee-tech industry can be divided into two groups: Those that believe that bees will continue to play a role in the world and try to find ways to “manage” them effectively, and those searching for technological solutions to step in if they were to go extinct.
“I’d say 100 percent of our competition works within the existing boxes used for beekeeping, these are just wooden crates invented 170 years ago. The problem is that you can only do so much with these – you can’t put a camera or robotic arms within the existing boxes – they are all based on the assumption the beekeeper will have to physically go to the hive.” For example, some firms offer internal hive sensors based on audio, “but we wanted to recreate the actual work of beekeeping and when a beekeeper arrives at a hive, they look at it, not listen to it.” BeeWise’s hives provide beekeepers with information that in the past was locked within the bees’ blackbox.
Perhaps it would be better to find alternatives to bee pollination, so we don’t over exploit them?
Safra: “Maybe you are right. Fifty years ago we had 20,000 types of bees – but we destroyed the terrains they needed and no one is taking the initiative to fix this problem. The fate of honeybees would be identical were they not so important for the world’s nutrition.
“The honeybee has very few tools to survive without management, most bees that ‘escape’ from commercial hives do not survive in the wild because of viruses. They have no pastures, what happens when there are no flowers?
“Transportation allows bees access to pastures throughout the year. By the way, transportation itself is a complex matter that kills bees, because these are wooden boxes that are exposed to shaking and weather conditions. But our containers have addressed that – they allow travel that is safe, relatively stable, and they have temperature and humidity control.”
You say your mission is to help save the bees, but you are working for commercial clients with financial goals who manipulate bees for their benefit – beekeepers will kill the queen bee to increase productivity in the hive, for example, and feed the bees sugar syrup so they grow unnaturally.
“We sell to beekeepers and each one of them works in their own way, but by and large these are people who love bees. We need to provide sugar only because we take their honey, and killing the queen is something only very small growers will do.
“Unlike raising livestock for human consumption, our hives for example do not change the nature of the hive, we don’t make it smaller or break up their social units. If we don’t use bees the entire world’s diet will change – and access to food, especially to vegetables and especially in the third world, will become expensive if not actually unattainable.”