Honeybees are essential for environment health and to sustain human life, being accountable for more than 80% of food supply worldwide thanks to the impollination of more than 400 different type of crops and 1/6 of flowering plants. However, pesticides, poor diet, pests and pathogens, poor bee-hive management and climate changes are hreatening the species, leading to a fast and dangerous increase in deaths (53% of deaths in Europe in 2016 and about 90% in the US). This burden is causing severe economic losses in all EU 27, incentivating the uncontroled import of foreign bee products and leading to depreciation. Europe is facing a growing need to guarantee the local and km 0 productions using a full quality control based on a physicochemical, microbiological and geographical description. 3bee HIVE-TECH is an innovative end-to-end IoT system enabling completely autonomousreal-time monitoring of beehives allowing to predict and to prevent bee death due to environmental and biological factors (pathogens, chemicals pesticides etc...) swarming and bee infertility and supports the bee products traceability, being completely self-powered and self-sustainable. The approach has already been demonstrated on the field and now the conclusive improvement of the concept has to be performed by means of a design optimization focused on the reduction of production costs, a final implementation of the innovative technological aspects related to energy harvesting through vibrations and the related software/cloud architecture, and the design of innovative predictive beehive health assessment algorithms with the aid of excellent academic partners In order to reach the market, 3bee needs to:
-finalize HIVE-TECH unit industrial design with the final hardware/software configuration for a Minimum Viable Product;
-test the final prototype in an operational environment, to reach TRL9;
-industrialize the technology, protecting the intellectual property (IP), creating an optimized supply chain and launching the technology to prospective investors;
-develop and implement the commercialization strategy.
