Due to challenges from climate change and an ever-growing world population the agricultural sector is under tremendous pressure to produce a lot more crop on limited acres. Bees play a vital role in save guarding a third of the world food production through their pollination activity.
With hivepoll we not only want to build a system which is able to protect beehives from parasites but establish bee colonies as a completely new kind of environmental and pollination data source. By introducing hivepoll we will be able to establish a novel data exchange platform between beekeepers and other stakeholder, e.g. in the agriculture market. Hivepoll offers a low-cost visual computing system to detect threats to beehives in real time but also unprecedented insights into the performance of bee colonies as pollinators and potentially how they are affected by adverse environmental conditions and climate change. By analyzing the amount and kind of polls collected as well as real-time flight characteristics we can turn beehives into novel biological sensors with far reaching consequences for the AgTech Market, beekeepers and public authorities. The data gathered by hivepoll allows to predict crop yield and using better models to manage crop failure risks, two features which are among the biggest opportunities for Big Data applications in agriculture. With hivepoll it will become possible to provide an early warning system in case of a low pollination performance as well as being able to counter these adverse effects and thus securing food production yields. Furthermore, an effective parasite detection will contribute to the health of bee colonies and their survival in good health over the winter which is a prime concern of bee keepers and farmers.
