A quick Google can return all sorts of fun facts about bees – that they have four wings, that all worker bees are female, that they use the position of the sun to navigate several miles a day – and all sorts of stark realities too – a third of the world’s food production depends on the insects and billions are dying every year because of climate change, decreasing crop diversity and habitat loss.
As the Earth’s population continues to rise, so does the importance of pollinating animals, and so does the mortality rate of bees. It has led to the UN designating May 20th as World Bee Day to raise awareness of their importance to human life and seen companies like BeeHero founded to pair generations of beekeeping experience with the latest technology to maintain healthy bee colonies and ensure efficient pollination for crops. To date, BeeHero has deployed its smart technology on more than 50,000 hives, helping to pollinate 54 billion flowers and 3 million trees. Integral to the company’s early success has been 3D printing.
“Startups need to act fast and to move fast,” BeeHero CEO Omer Davidi tells TCT. “Planning six to eight weeks ahead before testing, moulding and other stuff is quite tricky.”
What BeeHero brings to market is a precision pollination as a service contract for farmers, and a supply of Smart Hive units for beekeepers. Smart Hive works by placing sensors, which are housed inside 3D printed casings, into beehives to monitor the health and stresses of the queen and colony in real-time in a bid to reduce mortality rates.
Having initially deployed 3D printing for prototyping, BeeHero soon moved into production with the technology, harnessing Shapeways' Selective Laser Sintering capacity to print the sensor casings in a nylon material, selected because of its biocompatibility. While 3D printing these parts actually costs more than to manufacture them with a traditional method, BeeHero has good reason for going down the AM route, as Davidi explains.
“It’s never the final product. There are a lot of changes that need to be made all the time. And if you look at it from the cost of the unit, moulding is probably cheaper, but the cost of changing the pattern all the time is quite expensive. [When] you acknowledge the fact that the cost of change is going to be tremendous, working in this model is probably better.”
BeeHero
BeeHero's Smart Hive sensor.
Davidi spent ten years prior to BeeHero working in the cybersecurity space and made the step into the agricultural field after meeting Itai Kanot, a second-generation commercial beekeeper whose family owns the largest bee farm in Israel. After many discussions with Kanot about the challenges faced by beekeepers and farmers, Davidi and Kanot set up a company that could address them, with the former as CEO and the latter as COO.
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The idea is simple. To make sure that colonies aren’t lost, and that hives are efficiently deployed to maximise the number of flowers being pollinated, they needed to know more about the health and behaviour of bees.
“What we’ve tested in the past is how we can send specific things inside the hives in the heart of the colony, collecting data like sound, temperature, humidity, magnetic field and so on, and be able to identify patterns to alert whenever the queen is in danger or whenever there is a high level of mites. That requires the intervention of the beekeepers,” explains Davidi. “Being inside that environment is quite challenging. We’ve faced bees eating stuff we’ve put there; we’ve seen things that bees considered as a threat and covered it and we couldn’t sense anymore. There are a lot of aspects that need to be addressed when introducing an external body in this organism.”
BeeHero
And when in that process, the BeeHero team has enjoyed the capability of doing different things quickly, tweaking design characteristics and printing new iterations: “It’s not weeks of trial and error, it’s days of trial and error,” Davidi says. When the company started, it was placing wires embedded with microphones and sensors into the hives, which was effective, but not likely to be something they could commercialise. Then, having cased up the sensors, they started with a device that was too big and split the hive’s brood – where the queen lays her eggs – which was said to affect the natural behaviour of the hive.
BeeHero has since addressed these issues and come up with a circular device that can sit on top of a frame, robust enough to endure any wear and tear, is plug and play so BeeHero isn’t required to install each unit and does not harm the bees or the hive. The company has got to this stage after testing various designs and materials, monitoring how each variation affects the sensory technology and whether it disrupts the bees, before deciding on nylon.
“First of all, we got the materials pretty quickly, we put it into hives, and we kept sensing those hives, and we could identify whether the bees are reacting in an awkward way; they react whenever there’s a real problem inside the colony. We identified pretty quickly that [with our product] that’s not the case,” Davidi says. “From a biological perspective, whenever the bees consider something as a threat to the colony, they react very fast and usually the best way for them to handle external intruders is by covering it with propolis, and we haven’t seen any such behaviour of the bees to this material.”
The company has moved through post-prototyping phases of the project alongside Shapeways, a service Kanot had used previously. Deploying its manufacturing expertise into the Smart Hive product, Shapeways was able to optimise the design for 3D printing and go into production using Selective Laser Sintering.
“They came to us with almost a finished product,” Shapeways CRO Miko Levy recalls. “When we tested it, we saw it wasn’t optimised for 3D printing, so our user application team worked with BeeHero’s designer to do a few more iterations to pinpoint it so they’ll be able to click it and it will stick in a good way. We came back with SLS, a versatile plastic, and I think it looks great. The end result is beautiful. We produced a couple of dozens of thousands of parts within a short cycle, our factory was working around the clock to make sure it went out on time.
“This is the advantages of 3D printing. You could print industrial-grade products in a fast and short turnaround time without having to worry about inventory suppliers or if they were to injection mould that and have hundreds of thousands of pieces sitting in a factory, then realising this is not the right solution.”
BeeHero
Installing BeeHero's Smart Hive device.
As it stands, Shapeways’ SLS 3D printing capabilities are helping to pollinate millions of plants by monitoring tens of thousands of hives via BeeHero’s technology. With Smart Hive, beekeepers have access to real-time data of their yards’ performance and progress, with the ability to visualise every hive remotely to allow for planning and managing of visits to the hives. They also have a map that can direct them and their team to the areas most in need of attention. For BeeHero’s farmer customers, it’s about making sure that hives are active and deployed in the right positions to accurately forecast the progress of pollination throughout the season. If there’s been a use of pesticides that may affect the bees’ ability to pollinate, then the solution is to place more bees in those yards to make up for any shortfall.
Whether it's blueberries, apples, cashew nuts, almonds or other food crops, BeeHero says its Smart Hive technology is returning significant increases in both yield and profit.
“From the farmer side, we haven’t invented the fact that precise pollination or optimised coordination increase yields,” Davidi says, “[but] I think the innovative approach that BeeHero brought made it scalable. Instead of doing it in a small-scale experiment to show impact, we can deploy it with [more than 50,000] hives, which is quite impressive. It’s the fourth largest provider of pollination services. Moving forward, we’re looking to eventually be in one million hives.
“On the beekeeper side, we’ve seen more than 10-15% decrease in mortality just by alerting the beekeepers [and] addressing the problems on time now. If you know the queen has died in a colony and you go in the next two or three days, you can put the queen cell and save the colony. If you wait for the next time you’re going to visit the colony without knowing the queen has died, it’s very unlikely that you still have something to do once you notice it.”
Such benefits are driving the adoption of BeeHero’s Smart Hive technology, which it sees as a win for everyone: farmers, beekeepers and nature. They are also driving BeeHero to continue improving its understanding of bee behaviour and precise pollination, to further explore ways of monitoring inside colonies and trees, to scale to volumes of hundreds of thousands of units rather than just tens of thousands, and to increase its application of 3D printing as it does so.
“BeeHero is an amazing company,” Levy finishes. “The team is [made up of] great people, with great backstories and what they’re trying to do is changing the world. It’s an amazing partner to have.”
