Almond Pollination and Bee Hero with CEO, Omer Davidi (S6, E32)

S6, E32 - Almond Pollination and Bee Hero with CEO, Omer Davidi

Mike Maier: Welcome to  Beekeeping Today Podcast. I'm Mike Maier, a beekeeper from Bavaria, Germany. Greetings from the snowy Alps. Enjoy the show.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to  Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, quick shout out to all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors.

You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey, thanks a lot, Mike. we have listeners all around the world, Becky. Mike's from Germany. That is fantastic. We've had quite a few listeners call in and leave messages for us from all around the world.

Becky: It is exciting. Germany is such a fantastic place for honeybees and beekeeping. You just have to walk through the city streets of any of the towns and you'll find something bee-related. I'm so happy that he left us that great opening.

Jeff: We'll have to get him in touch with Kirsten.

Becky: Oh, there you go. There you go. We've got friends all over the place.

Jeff: [chuckles] That's a good feeling. We have a great show lined up for you today. Becky, have you ever been out in the almond orchards when they're all in bloom?

Becky: I have not been in the almond orchards. It's actually on my wishlist of things that I do sometime.

Jeff: I think it would be just wonderful to see the photos are wonderful, the activity, the bees. It would be really good to see.

Becky: It's hard to grasp almost 2 million colonies making their way across the United States to one single destination and the coordination it takes. I've seen pictures, but I agree, the activity of both the bees and the beekeepers has to be something to experience.

Jeff: Today's guest is Omer Davidi, who is the CEO and co-founder of BeeHero. They provide services for beekeepers and growers out in the almond, in any orchards, but specifically right now we're talking about the almond orchards. We're here to talk about what they're doing, both their technology and their software.

Becky: He's trying to innovate the industry, which is extremely interesting. I'm looking forward to learning more about the role that they're playing in this very big event for beekeepers each year.

Jeff: The beekeeper success is really important. As we've talked about on prior episodes, if the bees are doing well during the almond bloom, the bees are going to be in good shape for all of us in the springtime when we receive our packages and when we receive our nucs. I think that's a good thing that we keep an eye on what's going on in almond orchards, not to mention all the good almond butter and-

Becky: Almond milk.

Jeff: -almond and almond milk.

Becky: My coffee appreciates this episode.

[laughter]

Becky: I think it's interesting as a beekeeper to try to just grasp you're part of something that is a very big operation, but maybe your part is the fact that you're receiving the benefits of how well that industry does each year in the orchards. Because if they're successful financially, then your cost for everything that you order is going to hopefully be a little bit lower when it comes to bees and queens.

Jeff: As we found out here in the Pacific Northwest last year, that if the bees are delayed getting out of the orchards in California, then everything downstream is delayed. The packages, the queens are coming on late, everything is impacted. It really interferes with our scheduling and everything we plan for throughout the winter and going into the springtime for our bees.

Becky: I'm looking forward to learning more and meeting Omer.

Jeff: Let's get to that right now. First, a quick word from our friends at Strong Microbials.

[music]

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbials site, make sure you click on and subscribe to  The Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show. Sitting around the virtual  Beekeeping Today Podcast table is CEO and co-founder of BeeHero, Omer Davidi, and he's here to talk to us about BeeHero.

Right now, the bees are lining up, going into the almond orchards, and BeeHero's right smack dab in the middle of all that. I think the timing is perfect. Thank you, Omer, for joining us.

Omer Davidi: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Becky: Welcome to the show, Omer. Omer, I feel bad that we're not giving you an award because it seems like you've been winning a lot of them lately.

Omer: [chuckles] We are definitely getting some good recognition on our efforts in this space, we have a lot more to do, so just started.

Jeff: Can you give us a little background about what BeeHero is and how you got started? Then we'll go from there.

Omer: Of course. BeeHero basically recognized the fact that we are struggling with beekeeping. Beekeeping became harder with the years, with the intensity of agriculture and some of the environmental changes that we are facing. Unlike some other places in the market, we tried also to tie it with some of the pollination efforts because we do understand that we need to provide a solution for the entire ecosystem for this to be adopted by many.

BeeHero focuses on pollination optimization while doing hive monitoring all year long. I think maybe the funny part is that I didn't come from the beekeeping industry. I came from cybersecurity. I found myself shifting from the cybersecurity world back in Israel many years ago into the beekeeping and the pollination industry. That was led by one of my co-founders, who is a second generation commercial beekeeper. His family owns the largest bee farm in Israel. That was some sort of a window into this fascinating world of bees and

pollination and here we are.

Jeff: Fantastic. We'll have to talk offline about cybersecurity because that's truly my background for the last 30 plus years. Yes, there's a lot of happening there too. We ought to start a podcast together, Omer.

[laughter]

Jeff: Can you give us a 10,000 foot level of what BeeHero does? You work with the beekeeper and you work with the growers. Let's look at what you do with the beekeepers first.

Omer: Sure. BeeHero developed low cost IoT sensor. It's a small unit that goes into an existing beehive. We acknowledge the fact that every time you introduce a change, people might struggle with it, so we wanted to make something that is quite seamless and can integrate to the way that we keep bees today. It plugs into the middle frame of the colony on the top bar and basically collect things like temperature, humidity, sound, and so on from inside the hive.

For experienced beekeepers who tend to just open the lid of the hive based on the sound, based on what we call intuition, they get a sense of some metrics about the hives. There are things that definitely require some further investigation. Our main effort was to try and remotely understand what's happening in this hive and how can we provide more data to the beekeepers to make informed decisions on when to visit the hives, what kind of treatment needs to be taken, and how to better sustain their bees and generate stronger and healthier colonies, and that's our beekeeper platform.

This is something that's available for our beekeepers all year long throughout the overwintering, throughout the pollination events, throughout the honey harvesting, all those activities, and working very closely with those beekeepers, mainly commercial beekeepers at this point.

Becky: Are these data that you're collecting, are they correlated to food resources, whether the colony is queen right, and the size of the colony?

Omer: Yes, I think, again, it's a fascinating world, right? You have this queen, one queen in the colony, and she's responsible for laying eggs and so on. Again, the audience is probably familiar with those things. When something is wrong, the hive reacts to it. For example, when a queen is not performing well or is even dead, she stops to generate this pheromone that says, "I'm here. I'm in the colony, all good." You start to identify patterns of stress. What we found out over the last few years is those patterns correlates to certain events within the hive. We can talk about queen failure, which is one of the things that we can early detect. We can talk about, the development of the colony. The colony is trying to regulate the temperature to maintain the development of the brood. The more brood you have, the more energy that they will invest in order to regulate the temperature within the hive.

Again, we talk about, artificial intelligence and machine learning and all those sophisticated terms, but eventually it's a simple biological behavior that's translated to different types of data points. Understanding how many bee frames you have in a colony, how many brood frames, whether the hive is about to swarm, all those things are some of the areas that we're investigating, researching, and then providing access to our beekeepers.

Jeff: You say you have a sensor that goes in the center frame. How is that information collected by the beekeeper?

Omer: We have basically two units. The first one is the in-hive unit. That's what we just discussed. That's the unit that plugs into the middle frame of the colony. Then we have the gateway unit, which sits in the yard. Talking about the commercial domain, you have a gateway on every pallet, but in a hobbyist environment, you can have a different structure. Sometimes it doesn't even sit on pallets. Then the gateway will pull the data from the in-hive sensors every few hours and will upload it to the cloud. The beekeepers do not need to do anything active for the data to get into the cloud and that's where we run the analysis and provide insights into what's happening.

Of course, if there's any sort of an interrupted, an immediate alert of moving hives, opening hives, things that can help the beekeepers better understand what's happening out there in the field, then it will immediately send this information. Over the last two years, we spent more efforts into the mobile integration. when you're in the yard and you want to go into the specific hive with a queen problem, to just fix this thing. That's where we spent more efforts working with our close beekeepers, the design partners because it's a tough environment.

You work with all this equipment and taking the mobile is not really realistic, so trying to find the right balance by supporting the beekeepers to become more efficient during their visits and also make sure we do not create, this techie overhead that is not realistic in the real life.

Becky: I have to ask because I'm sure some beekeepers are getting excited. What is the minimum number of colonies for your beekeeping partners?

Omer: We focus mostly on commercial beekeepers that pollinate. I guess we're probably playing on a load of bees, so let's say 400, 450 plus hives. We are getting, I would say more and more inquiries from, sideliners and hobbyist beekeepers that are interested to get, exposed into the technology and how it works. We are working now in order to find the right way to do it. We work as a startup eventually so we are always limited on resources. We need to make sure that we don't spread too much and eventually do not deliver.

We're trying to make those shifts in a smart way, in a thoughtful way, but ensure that, whether it's a matter of another year or two, it will be available for pretty much every beekeeper out there.

Jeff: Is it one sensor per hive or is it one sensor per pallet? How do you set that up?

Omer: At the moment, it's one sensor per hive. When we first started, I talked about the resources and so on. I said, "What's the minimum number of hives that you need to monitor in order to get a good understanding?" For some of the problems that, we talk about lack of food, if the bees do not have any forage surrounding the hives, monitoring one hive or pallet could be enough. If you want to get an understanding of exposure to chemicals or even stealing hives and stuff like that, one hive might be enough.

What we have learned is that as you are trying to also optimize the process of pollination and get precise indications about queen failure, for example, one hive per pallet would not be sufficient, and now it's a question of unit economics, how much does it cost to equip those hives with units and whether, saving the hive will show you an immediate ROI. We have moved to just deploying in all the hives.

Jeff: How long does the battery last in that? I imagine it uses a coin-type battery.

Omer: We build it in a way that it actually holds a bigger battery. It's like two queen cells sitting on the sides of the sensor and it plugs into the frame. The in-hive unit should last for 20 years. I say should because we don't exist 20 years, but based on all the calculations that we've done, it's 20. Let's say it's 10, just to be on the safe side. The gateway unit is the unit that requires at this point a little bit more effort, so probably three to five years. Is it a reasonable lifespan for the batteries of the gateway?

Our team is actually working on a hybrid models, strong batteries, and solar panels. We started with solar panels in the early days. It just didn't work well in a real life environment, so we are now revisiting this. Ideally, battery is not something you need to worry about. We haven't encountered a situation of units running out of batteries, putting aside our research efforts, we sample like crazy.

Jeff: The gateway, is it a cellular gateway or is it a Wi-Fi?

Omer: It's a cellular gateway. Again, we work with the commercial beekeepers and they don't tend to keep their bees around places with Wi-Fi. We do have a version that we work with the USDA, for example, with satellites where they're trying to monitor beehives in rural areas and places where you don't have good coverage. At this point, the majority of our units are cellular. I guess at some point as we expand more into the sideliners and the hobbyist markets, again, that's not our core priority. At this point, we will allow also some other connectivity solutions.

Jeff: We have the individual data point from the hive going to the gateway and from there you have this collection of, I don't know, multiple beehives going into the cloud and data without analysis is not very useful. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll talk about what you do with all that data to make it useful for the beekeeper.

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Jeff: Welcome back, everybody. We're talking about all the data that you've collected. It goes up into the cloud to the big data cloud in the sky that everyone's data goes to. What do you do with that? How do you make that useful for the beekeeper?

Omer: When we look at the data, we look at it in three different layers. The first one is the hive level, trying to understand what happens in this specific hive. The second one is the yard level. You expect the same or similar behavior by hives in the same yard because they have access to the same forage. They are experiencing the same environment and so on. Then you have the full data set.

As you mentioned, this cloud that we talk about, we've been building this for the last six plus years. It's by far the largest data set of bees and pollination out there. When we look at a certain situation, we can also look in our network into other hives that show the similar behavior and learn from what we've seen there in order to indicate what's happening.

Our annual effort is basically to provide beekeepers access to data as if they were visiting the yards. Again, you won't be able to replace the experience of a beekeeper, but even if you take them 80% closer to being in the yard, getting indications of what's happening, that's very strong for them to make informed decisions of when to visit the yards, what things to bring with them. Do I bring quinces or do I send sugar cereal? Those kinds of things that can be already determined before visiting the yard and helping a lot with reducing the operational costs, labor costs, and eventually generating stronger and healthier hives that make more money from pollination and also producing honey.

The second layer is, of course, everything related to pollination. I think what we understood is that we cannot put all the overhead costs on the beekeeper and expect to scale very fast. We need to find another player in this ecosystem that we can provide value so the adoption will be faster. A big portion of our efforts with the data is to understand pollination, to understand how to take those specific hives and deploy them in this specific field to ensure the process of pollination is done well, so everyone basically wins.

Becky: I'm going to do a non-tech question for the other half of the audience, you two nerds. [chuckles] My question is the data that you are collecting, you're getting temperature data. Are you able to determine, there's one behavior that the bees will do? It's been researched in a limited way, but basically it's called a fever where they'll raise the temperature of the hive and scientists believe that that's going to combat pathogens. Are you able to collect that sensitive of data and then on the big scale that you're looking at with the number of colonies you are managing or monitoring?

Omer: I think it's fascinating a lot of those amazing behavior of bees to address different things and we have also scientific collaborations with a lot of universities and so on that are using our technology in order to make their own research and ideally provide them more visibility to things they couldn't see before. We do recognize this event of overheating. One of the things that we provide is indication about overheating and overheating is interesting because it's a very fine line between addressing pathogens or different threats on the colony and affecting the brood.

When we see, for example, a hive that is exposed to chemicals, you'll see that they're experiencing this overheating event. It's like confuses them in a way in terms of regulating the temperature. What we have found that if the overheating event is happening for more than 40 minutes at a certain temperature, which probably the smarter people in bee here knows, it affects the brood.

It affects the development of the next generation. You are opening the hive and the brood, but it's not developing as it's supposed to develop. It might have some sort of a damage in development, so in two or three weeks, once the majority of the colony will be based on this brood that was developing non-good conditions, the colony might fail to operate. I think on the pathogens and some other things, we can do a lot more research in order to understand what's happening, but the activity that you mentioned is definitely something that we see in the data in the broody.

Becky: I'm just going to do a quick follow-up and then you guys can talk about sensors and data and transmission and text. You mentioned alerting. Are you able to communicate emergency alerts? For example, if the colonies start moving and they're not supposed to a different location, are you able to let the beekeepers know that something's going on or if there's an overheating event that might be prolonged?

Omer: Yes, for some situations. Some of our models needs to look at repetitive data basically in order to get an understanding. For example, if we indicate that there's a queen problem, we might wait for a few more hours for another sample to validate, so we don't want to send someone to the field saying there's a queen problem. They open the hive and everything is fine. They won't appreciate it much.

The fact that there's some sort of a linearity in biology, knowing that it's very unlikely that four hours ago you had no queen and now you have a queen, it could happen theoretically, but it's very unlikely, then we can validate those things. There are events where we call them interrupt where something is happening now and it's clear. Opening a hive is a simple one. We get indication, change of temperature, increasing light levels and so on. We provide an immediate alert. Hive movement, so if the hives are being moved or the pallets are being moved, whether it's the gate or the sensors, we also provide alerts.

We spend a lot of time and effort in order to refine the threshold for those things because sometimes you have strong wind that will move the hive and you're like, "The hives are moving. Do I want to send someone or not?" It's always this internal debate of at what point you don't want to take risks that you're missing something but you also don't want to have those false positive. Those are the two main interrupts that we will provide indications about overheating and stuff like that we'll probably update on the next load. It's a matter of a few hours from the event until you know about it.

Jeff: I was thinking about overheating on a truck when they're loaded up, are there alerts associated with them?

Omer: Yes. What we do when we analyze that the hives are being moved, we basically don't sample everything at this point, but we sample more often so temperature is one of those things. It's interesting when you put those hives on the trucks and you send them away, sometimes you have situations of truck drivers stopping to get something to eat at noon and the truck is in the middle of no shade and not ventilated well and so on and you do see a rise in temperature in those hives.

Even if it doesn't affect the bees themselves at this point, it might affect the semen sac of the queen. You can get to a situation of which you're getting a healthy-ish colony to the field, the semen sac is ruined, so every eggs that the queen is laying will not develop to be a bee, and in a matter of two weeks, you'll probably replace half of the bees with empty brood cells. The indications about overheating during transportation is definitely something that we provide. I believe on a 10 minutes intervals, but it's definitely a matter of tens of minutes, if not 10 minutes.

Jeff: Are you done with your non-tech questions, Becky?

Becky: You go right back to--

[laughter]

Becky: I'll jump in again to save the non-tech listeners. You're doing a very good job of explaining it, but go for it.

Jeff: My next question, it really isn't as techie as you might fear. You have all the data, how do you present it to the beekeeper? Is it on their phones? Is it on a tablet or is it on a computer screen dashboard? How is it presented?

Omer: Yes, so I guess we made all the mistakes possible in order to get to where we are. We started a few years ago and we said, "We're going to build it on a desktop and it's going to be a management platform for apiaries. We can do everything." Then we basically learned that we're not doing it very well and we started to focus mostly on the data insights, leaving aside how they want to handle the data, what they want to do with it, again, going a few years back.

Then we learned that most of the beekeepers that we operate with do not necessarily use the desktop during the day. They might look at it in the morning or in the evening or in the weekends when they take all the notes from the notebook into the Excel sheets and stuff like that, so we put extreme efforts on working on the mobile app to make it seamless, basically, for them to work with and that's where we put most of our efforts.

Now that we see the majority of the beekeepers, it's not all of them yet, starting to shape the way that they operate their business based on the indications they get from the platform, we are now trying to work with them and say, "How can we support you to better manage your apiary?" That's where we are now spending more efforts also on the dashboard platform because there are things you won't do. If you want to look at reports on certain yards, you have yards that are losing money, or you have yards that are making money.

It's very hard for a beekeeper to provide you answers like what's the ROI of every yar, because the hives are moving. You're mixing them. You're splitting them. We track all those things. Now it's about how can we provide those reports in a way that is realistically, and that cannot be done on mobile. That's where we put more resources now into the dashboard and the management platform, again, to support the beekeepers. It's mostly coming from them, that they know better than us what would help.

Becky: That's interesting. I know that researchers who are collecting data on bees in, for example, Minnesota or North Dakota that then go to California and then come back. One of the trickiest parts is the fact that those bees are moved all around. Old school is you put a tag on it and you hope to be able to find that tag when it comes back to collect your data sample. Then you hope to be able to find it each way in the process. This is a game changer for a scientist to be able to track those colonies. That's really exciting to hear about.

Omer: Yes, I agree. We're doing a lot of efforts with scientists. One of the things that came over and over again is the fact that BeeHero is monitoring more than 200,000 hives today. Giving researchers access to data, anonymous data on different behavior of bees can also help them to decide what they want to research. It's just very hard for research facilities to conduct experiments on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of hives in different geographies. You just talked about one single problem. If you put the tag on the lid and someone replaced the leaves of the hives, that's it. It's over.

That's why we are trying to get a better understanding, how can we give access to this data in a way that helps the scientific ecosystem to provide better insights into the beekeeping world and not jeopardize our beekeepers' efforts and some other things.

Jeff: We've talked about the sensor. We've talked about the gateway. We've talked about the back end, the dashboard, if you will, for the beekeeper and how they can help them to make management decisions. Your business model for BeeHero is helping the growers, whether it be almond. We're in almonds. We're talking about almonds this month. Next month or two months down the road, it'll be apples or be peaches or be pears, blueberries the whole season. How is this information that you're gathering from the individual hive and the yards, how is that used to help the grower?

Omer: Pollination today is done, I would say, in an old-fashioned way. It's based on the number of boxes that you put per acre and the volatility of hives, of the efficiency level of hives that we see today, it's hard to be a beekeeper, it is quite significant. Putting an empty box in the field might give you the number of boxes that you want per acre but definitely not the number of bees. In a way, I think the market was built to fail because what happens because farmers do not necessarily have a good understanding of the hives and what's happening inside is that good beekeepers that spend extreme efforts to introduce the strongest and the most efficient hives to the field, might be compensated the same as beekeepers introducing weak hives into the field.

I'm not thinking anyone is doing it on purpose, but practically, good beekeepers are not getting the right compensation for their efforts and that's where we try to basically break the equation and say, "It's not about boxes, it's about the actual pollination force that you have in the field." If you want to take it five years down the road. It's about the quality of pollination that you get. That's what you care about. If you can tie the incentives in a way that the good beekeepers introducing strong hives makes more money supporting pollination in a better way, then basically everyone wins.

We also provide the tools to support the beekeepers that are not doing as good to be better so they can make more money, they can monetize their assets, their hives in a better way. Today, maybe it's unfortunate, but today the pollination industry is pretty much keeping some of the beekeepers with their heads above the water. The price of honey is dropping as we are getting more and more fake honey mixed into the real honey and pollination is important for the future of beekeeping. That's where we are trying to create this win-win model where farmers can get more assurance into the process of pollination, which is a critical component in food production that is today not really managed in a precise way.

Beekeepers will get better compensation for quality and BeeHero can benefit in this business model that we've built. It's a lot of crops. As you mentioned. Almonds are today the largest pollination provider in the US and in Australia, expanding to apples, cherries, all the stone fruits basically, and berries later on. Some of the row crops joined the party as well, whether they depend on bees or whether they benefit a lot from bees, that's good news for beekeepers.

Becky: Omer, you talked about the fact that there are scientists on the bee side who are using these data and able to ask questions. Are there scientists on the grower side who are also looking at the impact of the numbers that you are able to provide on the pollination services they're getting?

Omer: Yes, most of the efforts that we have today on the scientific side is with the seed producers, mostly vegetable seed producers, but also some of the canola growers and so on. It usually splits in two. The first one is to optimize the process of pollination. In some places, you integrate different types of bees in the field and so on. We actually introduced a new solution called the Pollination Insights Platform. We are also integrating in-field sensing to get a better understanding of the spread of the bees in the field.

It's one thing to introduce strong and healthy colonies, it's another thing to ensure that they either go to where they're supposed to go, or there are specific areas in the field. It could be even microclimate that affected that are not getting the same number of bee visits as other areas, and you want to make sure that you enhance those areas with extra bees. We've seen some fascinating things.

Again, it's a biological world, so you don't want to confuse noise with conviction on certain things, so we're not coming out there and claiming to be able to predict deals and stuff like that, but you definitely see strong correlations between bee activity, overlap between males and female flowers, and so on, and the outputs, so we spend a lot of efforts with major seed producers at this point.

On the scientific side, we also have some other, I would say more advanced, usually bigger, farms that have R&D budget, especially during these days with the inflation prices of chemicals, everything is more expensive. People are trying to limit their R&D efforts, but we still have few that are conducting more, I would say, deeper scientific approach into pollination, but it's not the majority.

Jeff: As a beekeeper, and I'm looking at investing and putting money into the BeeHero technology to improve my pollination services for growers. Do you provide tools, reports, dashboards? What do I give a grower to show that they should select me over Becky?

Omer: The way we build it is that we're not charging the beekeepers. We understand that beekeepers are not in a position, sometimes they are in a position, but they probably will not favor putting money, day one on the table. Basically, what we do, we provide them the sensors, we validate our beekeepers before we onboard them. We want to make sure that they're genuine beekeepers that care about bees and what they do and so on. We provide them the sensors and they become part of our network. We become their partner in pollination. You can look at it even as some sort of--

We become their broker in a way so they don't need to care about finding the right farmer or where exactly to deploy the bees. All those things will come from our platform and they get it to their basically mobile phone. Based on the real-time indications from their hives, we know how those hives needs to be deployed so we can meet the requirements of the farmers when we add the farmers on board, their farms to the BeeHero platform.

We basically walk as partners, where we give them the technology for free and we help them to improve their hives, providing them access to data they didn't have before, and then ensuring that they are monetizing their assets in the best way possible, ensuring farmers getting what they need. It's some sort of a joint venture. [chuckles]

Jeff: Who holds the contract with the grower? Does BeeHero or does the beekeeper?

Omer: BeeHero does.

Jeff: You are essentially the broker?

Omer: Correct.

Becky: Now, you're doing this not just in the United States, but this is a global effort, correct?

Omer: Yes, we started in the US because it's probably the biggest and most advanced industry in the world. What we have seen is that the demand or the understanding of lack of pollination and the bee challenge is something that is out there. In places where it aligns with our commercial efforts, then we are expanding. We expanded to Australia this year and the adoption was more than what we expected.

In some places, it's trickier. We have a place, a region in France, who reached out to BeeHero. They faced more than 80% mortality rate this year and they're trying to understand how can they leverage BeeHero technology. That's where we need to be more creative and better understand how can we support them in a way that, again, does not defocus us, so we support the beekeeper community in those regions, but doing it in a thoughtful way so we exist in a way.

There's a lot of activity in South America with avocado and huge berry, booming market that keen to get access to precision pollination. It will take a little bit more time, everything goes slow in this environment because it's biology and the seasons, and we deal with IoT sensors, so it's not like I press a button and tomorrow I have those additional 100,000 units. It takes two months. There are a lot of drivers in this expansion efforts, but there's a lot more work to do.

Jeff: That's a big undertaking you have on your shoulders there.

Omer: Yes. It's interesting, we talked about the cybersecurity world and companies I found in the past. One of the things that I kept hearing in this industry and going to investors, talking to them about bees, the audience here knows bees. When you talk to a venture capital in the Bay area, or you don't know much about bees, they might know a hobbyist beekeeper or they've seen a hive, or they love honey, those are usually the things that you hear.

To explain the importance of bees in this food system, it's nature. Putting aside biodiversity that we haven't touched because how do you monetize it? Why would someone invest in something they don't really understand how to monetize? At some point, BeeHero will also address those things. Once we become stronger and bigger, we will be able to support with our technologies some of the biodiversity efforts and so on. That was a major thing. What we kept hearing is, "You won't be able to scale very fast in this industry. It will take you years, and you will run out of cash and so on." Maybe that's why I'm still mentioning that we are trying to be very focused. We want to make sure that we do not defocus.

I do think that BeeHero is definitely an outlier in terms of the expansion. We moved from zero hives on the commercial side, let's say four-ish, five, yes, four, five years ago to maybe close to 300,000 hives that we will have in 2024. The scale was huge, very frightening in a way. As you mentioned, there's a lot on the line here, but, yes, we're trying to be out there in the field, walk with the beekeepers, adjust the priorities based on what they need because if the beekeepers do better, pollination is done better, farmers do better, everyone wins.

Jeff: What do you see as your challenges in the coming years besides keeping up with the supply chain of the technology chips? [chuckles]

Omer: It's mostly about the team, bringing the right people to make sure that we maintain the culture of BeeHero, that we care about what we do. There are many ways to make money out there. I came from the cybersecurity world. There's a lot more money in the cybersecurity world than in the big keeping industry, but we want to do something that will make a significant impact. The impact will not be in certain geography or a certain crop, it needs to be wide. It needs to support the efforts of the global food production. I think my main challenge is making sure that we keep bringing the right talents to be here. People that are aligned on this vision of where we go with the company and make sure that they take ownership and deliver. It's all about the people.

Jeff: It's all about the people and the bees.

Omer: And the bees.

Becky: And the bees.

[laughter]

Jeff: We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything we haven't discussed that you would like to bring to our listeners attention?

Omer: I think it's extremely important that, we bring this out there. Most people, when they eat apples, they don't know that the bee visited this flower, and they don't necessarily tie it with the bee problem, and so on. I think it's about educating the non beekeepers or the non-farmers in the globe. I think once we all recognize the importancy of bees, then, whether we get more government support for beekeepers, or whether we are getting different initiatives to support those efforts, it's extremely important. We see that, the average age of commercial beekeeper is above 70 in the US.

If we don't make this business profitable and exciting, and I would say even techie because I think that's part of the things that some of the next generation is looking for, we'll find ourselves with no beekeepers in 10, 15, 20 years, and that's going to be a big, big mess.

Becky: You said it earlier that beekeeping hasn't seen significant innovation and we have been doing things the same way for a very long time. It is exciting to hear you bringing technology as a tool for beekeepers to innovate and to hopefully increase the health of the hives and the return on income.

Omer: I fully agree with you. Again, I'm coming from the tech side. I think sometimes on the tech side, we're trying to introduce solutions that the industry might not be ready for. We think tech will fix the world. I think the fact that we had Etai, my co-founder, a commercial beekeeper from day one, and was there to push back on every crazy idea we had of, "Oh, why are you doing things like that and so on? I think that was a core component of developing a solution that can integrate to the way that we do things.

Technology will not replace all of us. There's places where the joint efforts of the tech with the expertise is to win. That's part of what we see. That's part of what we believe in, part of our north star and where we're aiming to go. I couldn't agree more.

Jeff: Omer, appreciate you being here. Look forward to hearing about what you're doing next year. If you'd come back, we'd love to hear from you.

Becky: Good luck in the almonds this year, Omer.

Omer: Thank you so much. I would love to be back.

Jeff: Becky, this was my episode. It's all about technology.

Becky: I will say, and I will compliment you. You walked us through that very, very well because it was very clear that you were right there and excited to learn everything you could about the gateway and the sensor.

Jeff: I didn't ask him, how it was hosted, whether it was on Amazon Cloud or Google Cloud or something. I didn't get into the bits and bytes. I just wish [crosstalk] --

Becky: You wanted to. I could tell.

Jeff: Not really. What I was really interested in though, is in any of these technologies, whether it be from the consumer sensor or to the big boy sensors that the BeeHero has, technology for technology's sake is interesting, but it's not practical. What does it do for me? That's what I was trying to understand from a beekeeper standpoint. We didn't talk about contract pricing or anything else, but you have to figure since he's not charging a beekeeper for this, he's taken a cut of the share of the contract for the pollination, what's the value in return for both beekeeper and a grower for that broker, for that middleman service he's providing? I just wanted to try to understand it from a beekeeper standpoint.

Becky: It's interesting because if his services are actually growing in the United States, it means that the beekeepers are seeing that value, but it's a good discussion and it would be interesting to talk to a beekeeper who is part of his group and using his services just so that they could give us a direct report of what they've seen as far as changes in their operations. I don't know about you, but I wanted to hear more about those emergency alerts, and then going and checking out to see, really it's queenless? Okay, I've got to put a queen cell in here. That's such an interesting ability.

We're trying to write a manual right now to teach a beekeeper how to tell if their colony is queenless. I wonder if we're going to update it in 10 years and say, "If the sensor tells you that you don't have a queen in the colony." [laughs]

Jeff: If ChatGPT tells you that. That's an interesting point. I thought the same thing with the sensor, especially with transporting a truckload of bees, and what if you get an alert from a colony in the middle of all of that, what do you do?

Becky: What do you do?

Jeff: Yikes. Do you have any sensors in your hives?

Becky: Oh, that's such a good question. No, I don't have any sensors in my hive. I'm guessing you do.

Jeff: I have a few. We've talked about them in the past. At various episodes through the years, I like them sitting here at the desk, at the recording studio-

Jeff: -Beekeeping Today Podcast, and pulling up a screen and seeing what's going on in the colony and whether they're raising brood, whether they're not, et cetera. I find that really fascinating.

Becky: Do you think you check your bees more or less often because of the sensors or just the same?

Jeff: I go into them less.

Becky: You do? Okay. That could be really good for your bees as far as honey production and-

Jeff: Yes, I guess.

Becky: -queen health.

Jeff: I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Becky: I'm not going to get a sensor because I want to go into my bees every chance that I can. I don't want a sensor to take that away from me.

[laughter]

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple podcasts, wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any web page. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

[music]

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you the  Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:47:26] [END OF AUDIO]