Objective
For the past 15 years, European beekeepers have been reporting weakening bee numbers and colony losses. The situation
is worsening as according to a recent study of the European Union Reference Laboratory for honeybee health, some
countries are losing up to a third of their colonies every year. Honey bees are essential in the pollination of many agricultural
crops and concerns have been raised about the ability to maintain the pollination services required to ensure pollinator
dependent food production. Nowadays European citizens consider the decline in bee numbers to be the most serious
environmental issue – more than climate change.
The IoBee consortium wants to disrupt the beekeeping market by reducing colony losses by at least 50%! Through this
project, we aim to pilot and commercialise a new Internet of Things (IoT) sensor application that can automatically assess
the threat status to a colony. The system will wirelessly transmit results to a cloud server, making field data available for
running prediction models, perform risk assessments, issue warnings and make historical analysis using a SDSS- Spatial
Decision Support System. This will allow beekeepers to be active participants in colony surveillance programmes with
unprecedented accuracy and responsiveness, and as a result, unhealthy or threatened colonies will be remotely detected
earlier with greater precision, saving millions of Euros in potential losses.
Many systems to monitor beehives already exist in the market. However there are 3 main gaps in the SoA:
1) No solution can i) “fingerprint” individual bees and determine if they are healthy or have a problem (disease,
poisoning, etc.), ii) identify bee castes, and iii) identify pest insects that attack hives.
2) No solution offers IoT capability, nor follows standards that could enable establishing the first interoperable
surveillance network in Europe.
3) No solution has a SDSS, which is paramount to an advanced EU surveillance system
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetinternet of things
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyentomologyapidology
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy scienceapiculture
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
08029 Barcelona
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.