Project description
Bees in their hives now have someone to watch over them
Most people are familiar with the wooden boxes dotting landscapes around the world that, for more than 150 years, have provided home and 'office' to billions of bees. Bees are essential to our food chain. More than a third of the world's food crops depend on pollinators to reproduce, and honeybees pollinate more than 80 % of cultivated crops. However, far too many hives the world over have succumbed to 'colony collapse disorder'. The Israeli SME Beewise is bringing beekeeping into the digital age with an autonomous beehive that allows beekeepers to remotely treat their hives and care for their bees. Integrating computer vision, AI and robotics, it enables automatic climate and humidity control, pest control, swarm prevention and harvesting and alerts beekeepers when things go awry. The EU-funded BeeHome project will optimise and validate the technology and work towards its commercial availability.
Objective
Pollination is crucial to life on the planet. Bees and other pollinators have thrived for millions of years, ensuring food security and nutrition, and maintaining biodiversity and vibrant ecosystems for plants, humans and the bees themselves. Globally, 75% of crops producing vegetables, fruits and seeds for human consumption depend on pollinators for sustained production, yield, and quality. In recent years, most countries in the world have reported high rates of disorders affecting their honeybee colonies. The seemingly unpredictable loss of bee colonies exacerbates the shortage of pollinators, which reached an unprecedented global rate of ~30% compared to 2%-3% a couple of decades ago.
The device beekeepers rely on to manage bees and take care of their ongoing upkeep is a wooden box designed 150 years ago, the beehive we’re all accustomed to seeing in the field. This “technology” does not allow beekeepers to maintain healthy bees in the face of modern challenges like pests, diseases, and climate change. Furthermore, this is the technology utilized to pollinate 75% of global crops for 7 billion humans, resulting in the most extreme pressure bees have ever experienced.
Beewise developed the Beehome platform, which is a modular commercial AI-powered apiary composed of hardware and software that fully automates beekeeping while optimizing pollination and honey production. The technology is not exclusive to honeybees and can support various species of bees that face extinction as well. The platform includes an automated robotic brood box management system, a computer vision-based monitoring system, AI-based decision making, an automated honey harvesting system and systems for pest control, feeding, and thermoregulation. The key objectives of the project are to optimize the software and the AI, to finalize the engineering of the hardware components, to validate the technology in a two-stage in-field testing and to obtain the CE mark for commercialization in Europe.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputer vision
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyentomologyapidology
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy scienceapiculture
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME - SME instrumentCoordinator
2523300 OSHRAT
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.