SmartBee is sweet solution

Testour – Elias Chebbi inspected a beehive in a field in Tunisia, minutes after a buzz on his phone warned him of a potential problem.

The 39-year-old beekeeper opened a flap in the hive to reveal a low-cost, locally made sensor dedicated to measuring key environmental variables. An app on his phone warns him if action needs to be taken.

Chebbi has two of the sensors, entirely produced in Tunisia by the only company of its kind in North Africa.

He periodically places one in each of the 100 or so hives he keeps, on a grassy hillside an hour’s drive from the capital Tunis. The devices, each costing under 300 Tunisian dinars (about R1 542), send live updates on temperature, humidity and the weight of the hive to a central computer.

It then analyses the data and helps him react quickly to potential problems – as well as selecting the most resilient, productive queens for breeding. That is a major asset as bee colonies face multiple threats.

Chebbi remembered a heatwave in 2013, before he started using the system, when he lost a quarter of his hives. But since he started using the SmartBee system – developed in 2020 by a group of Tunisian engineering graduates – his losses have dropped to under 10% of hives a year and it’s boosted honey production by 30 to 40%,

Now, Khaled Bouchoucha, 34-year-old chief executive of manufacturer Beekeeper Tech, said the sensors gather “a huge amount of information on the bees’ yield and the threats they face”.

This is fed wirelessly to the company’s cloud computing system, which analyses it to identify potential problems.

If it does, it sends a warning to the beekeeper to intervene – by cooling overheating hives, adding insulation to those that are dangerously cold, or providing sugar solution to those whose weight shows they have not produced enough honey.

The data the SmartBee app collects also tells beekeepers about the health and productivity of each hive.

Mnaouer Djemali, a cofounder of Beekeeper Tech, said this “enables us to measure the profitability of each queen” and to select the best for breeding.