Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
USING BIG DATA TO SAVE BEES
With global bee populations on the decline, we venture inside the hive to see how innovative technology is changing the future of beekeeping.
WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM – bees are dying off. Beekeepers are struggling to keep their hives healthy and thriving. In fact, more than 40 per cent of bee colonies are being lost each year in the US, a mysterious phenomenon scientists are calling colony collapse disorder. Bees are vital for most of the food that we eat. A world without bees could affect a third of the world’s crops, putting the global economy into disarray. ‘One in every three bites of food we take on any given day was probably helped along by a bee somewhere,’ says Jon Hoekstra of the World Wildlife Fund. Luckily, there’s a lot of buzz around innovative technology such as sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data that could bring us closer to exploring and understanding bee health.
One exciting project is The World Bee Project’s Global Hive Network (GHN), the first globally coordinated honeybee monitoring programme. The hives have sensors that collect data such as ambient temperature (outside of the hive), brood temperature (around the frame in the hive where the queen is laying eggs), humidity, rainfall and acoustic data – the noise or ‘hum’ that bees make.
‘The real “smart” bit is what happens when those hives are connected to GHN. By pulling all the information that is coming from hives into one big global database, GHN can generate new insights about bee health and its relationship with weather patterns, diseases, parasites, predator species and pesticides,’ explains Sabiha Malik, executive president of The World Bee Project. The goal is that the resource of data is made available to beekeepers, farmers, researchers, governments and other stakeholders, so they can work together to help protect bees, and our planet.
But to make a real impact, GHN needs to generate millions of billions of rows of data a day. ‘Just one of our monitored hives can produce a million data points a day – that’s exciting, but to make a real impact we must expand GHN,’ adds Malik. ‘To that end, we are hoping that industry and technology companies will support our work, not only because of the exceptional opportunities it offers them but also because they too carry the responsibility for caring for humanity.’
Using this technology will provide new ways to understand how bees are interacting with each other, and behaving in particular environments. It enables researchers to closely monitor and detect patterns, in turn protecting colonies in the long-term, which will ultimately contribute to protecting ourselves, and our planet.
The World Bee Project uses Oracle Cloud technology. Oracle, a global tech company, provides GHN with its artificial intelligence
(AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics capabilities. You might be wondering why. Well, there’s inherent value in the data that’s currently gathered from the hives. For example, bees are extremely good at maintaining the temperature of the hive around the brood frame during the months in the year when they are foraging for nectar and pollen and while the queen is actively laying eggs. Regardless of the hive’s ambient temperature, they keep it a constant 34.5°C inside. If, however, the sensors pick up a significant change in temperature that cannot be easily explained (such as during a hive examination), it can mean there’s another problem that needs urgent investigating.
Oracle’s design innovation director Andy Clark says that if the data from The World Bee Project’s hives is brought into the autonomous database in the Oracle Cloud, they’ll be able to overlay that data with other data that’s freely available – things such as pollution, habitat and farming practices. ‘We can use Oracle’s AI/ML to look for new associations and insights that aren’t readily apparent in the existing data and with its existing technology,’ continues Clark. ‘We’re thrilled to be working with Sabiha and her team on this critical mission – collectively, we want to inspire the next generation to explore a range of scientific- and technological concepts, as well as issues such as climate change and food security.’