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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

ApisProtect

BroodMinder Open Sources its Beehive Sensor Data

There are plenty of companies out there making sensors that allow beekeepers to monitor their hives. What sets BroodMinder apart is that it makes all of the data generated by its users free and open to the public by default.

BroodMinder is a small, bootstrapped company that sells basic hive sensors to the beekeeping enthusiast market (read: not big commercial operations). A basic temperature sensor will cost beekeepers just $30 to get started, and uses Bluetooth to transmit data to the BroodMinder mobile app on your phone once an hour. Users can then track their hive data on the MyBroodMinder app.

If you want to gather more data from your hives, BroodMinder also sells a humidity sensor, a scale to measure hive weight ($179) and a hive HUB that will continuously collect data from your sensors and beam them up to the cloud through a cellular connection ($398 for unit + cell subscription) or WiFi ($348 for unit + premium BroodMinder subscription).

If you want to keep your data private, you’ll have to pay $75/year for a BroodMinder premium subscription. “We want a big pile of data,” said Rich Morris, “Lead Drone” at BroodMinder. “We collect that data and store it for free in the cloud, as long as you agree that it is public domain.”

All shared data is anonymous and coded only by zip code. You can see the hive data for yourself via an interactive map over at beecounted.org. Right now, BroodMinder has 1,100 users across 1,700 apiaries and 2,700 hives, and the Broodminder database just crossed 100 million data points.

So what’s going to be done with all this data? That’s a good question. Right now, BroodMinder is just collecting data, it doesn’t offer machine learning or AI to turn that data in actionable insights for beekeepers. There are, however, some groups like university researchers poring over the data to see what can learned in aggregate, especially as it relates to any insights about latitude, climate change and bee health.

That’s not to say BroodMinder won’t find ways to monetize this data. At this point, the company is just too small to develop that robust of a product roadmap. Unlike other beehive monitoring services like ApisProtect and Nectar, which target the commercial space and have taken outside money, BroodMinder is funded by Morris and staffed mostly by volunteers.

Eventually, Morris wants to take BroodMinder into the agriculture space and sell to commercial operations, but his first priority is to grow a user base, collect information and then be able to show more concrete ROI.

Hopefully his open data approach can build more buzz for BroodMinder.

ApisProtect Raises $1.8M to Save the Bees Through IoT

ApisProtect, which uses Internet of Things (IoT) technology to monitor and help keep honeybee colonies healthy, announced today that it has raised a $1.8 million seed round led by Finistere Ventures and Atlantic Bridge Capital.

Based in Cork, Ireland, ApisProtect places sensors in commercial beehives to measure factors like humidity, temperature, sound and more. This data is transmitted back to ApisProtect where it applies machine learning algorithms to create actionable insights for beekeepers, such as if a queen is still alive, if there is a pest, or if a colony is about to swarm.

The ApisProtect sensor itself is about the size of a VHS cassette and uses a combination of radio networks including cellular and satellite communications to ensure that any beehive can be monitored, no matter how remote. “It can work in any beehive anywhere on earth,” Fiona Edwards Murphy Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of ApisProtect, told me in a phone interview.

As we’ve noted before, bee populations are declining. That is a bad thing since, according to the USDA, “One out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops each year, including more than 130 fruits and vegetables.”

ApisProtect has been in trials since the end of this summer and currently monitors more than six million honey bees in 144 hives across Europe and North America. The company is still working on its business model, but it will most likely be a subscription-based model with little up-front costs.

ApisProtect isn’t the only startup building a bee business. Up in Canada, Nectar has also developed a sensor system to monitor bee activity. Elsewhere in the apiary world, Bee Vector Technology is using bees as precision pesticide applicators.

This is the first fundraise for ApisProtect, which will use the money to open an office in Salinas, CA and scale up as quickly as possible to bring the product to market in 2019. With bees playing such a crucial role in our ecosystem, hopefully the work of ApisProtect and others will generate enough buzz to make a difference.