Israeli start-up Beewise is saving honey bees from extinction

Beewise, a start-up company on Kibbutz Beit HaEmek in the Western Galilee, aspires to save the honey bee. It has developed the world’s first – and only – robotic beehive that will help avert the honey bee’s fate.

In the start-up company’s office, founder and CEO Saar Safra, 46, who is soft-spoken and amiable, grew earnest when he talked about the urgent problem of saving the bees. There are eight billion people on the planet and bees pollinate 30% of all the vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts that people eat. To give it more of a visceral impact, Safra said that every third bite you eat depends on the health and productivity of honey bees. 

Last year, honey bee colonies showed a 40% decrease in population due to a variety of factors. That number has been reduced to 8% using artificial intelligence, robotics and software developed at Beewise. The company’s innovation has won prestigious global awards. Beewise currently sells to commercial beekeepers in Israel and the United States and plans to expand its operations worldwide in the coming years.

Safra founded Beewise in 2018, with Hillel Schreier, Boaz Petersil and Yossi Surin. The fifth partner is Eliyah Radzyner, a commercial beekeeper who approached Safra to explain the dire situation for honey bees. At the time, Safra had just returned from living for many years in Seattle, Washington, where he launched six start-ups. (Four of them succeeded, and two, he admitted, were “big failures.”) 

Safra knew nothing about bees. Radzyner, who had then been working as a beekeeper for the past eight years, sparked Safra’s curiosity when he said that beekeepers all used beehives – white wooden boxes that look like portable cabinets for old paper files – that were basically the same as when they were invented by Loranzo Langstroth in the 1850s, more than 150 years ago. Safra was challenged by Radzyner’s idea that there was a way not just to “think outside the hive” but to reinvent it. The men joined forces with the three others and set out searching for technological solutions to revolutionize the beehive.

BEEWISE DEVELOPED Beehome, a robotic beehive that houses up to 40 colonies. Picture it as a hi-tech condo where more than one million bees can live together. The Beehome looks like a rental storage container. On its sides are colorful vents where the bees enter and exit. The hive is completely solar-powered with rechargeable batteries. The inside of the Beehome looks like a library with hundreds of black-spined books, each one-centimeter thick, on its shelves. Upon closer inspection, one sees that these are the tiny cells – 6,000 of them – that the bees use to store honey. A strange rectangle on a movable arm resembling a TV stand (minus the screen) in the center of the beehive is the robot that uses artificial intelligence to care for the bees, like a built-in, 24/7 babysitter. 

Most commercial beekeepers have hundreds of beehives, and they are only able to check on the bees in any particular hive every few weeks, often arriving too late to solve problems that arise. The Beewise robot constantly monitors the bees and can respond immediately. For example, since climate change has negatively impacted bees, the Beehome can adjust the hive’s temperature and humidity. The robot treats the bees against infection, diseases and pests, in particular the deadly Varroa mite that grows in the bee’s abdomen and attacks its immune system. 

The Beewise system can also prevent one of the greatest threats to honey bees today: Colony Collapse Disorder, in which colonies somehow fail and there is a sudden death of bees. The cause of this disorder is not known, but researchers suspect multiple factors, including pesticides, deforestation and electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi towers. Since bees navigate by using a magnetic structure in their abdomens, some scientists believe the Wi-Fi radiation causes them to become disoriented. 

Finally, the Beehome avoids what is known as swarming. This occurs when a bee colony becomes overcrowded, resources are limited, and some of the bees take off to search for a new place to live. The robot senses when a colony might be about to swarm and adjusts conditions. The system also extracts the honey from the combs using an automated centrifugal system.

Safra said that scientists have tried to change the DNA of bees, reduced the amount of pesticides used to treat the bees and have put hives in different places. But “treating the bee in real time” is the only thing that has been effective in saving the bees.

Watching bees is “seeing Mother Nature in action,” said Safra. Over the course of 250 million years, evolution has helped bees, plants and flowers grow symbiotically. According to Safra, a bee’s tongue is just the right length to reach the nectar stored within a flower. Most nations around the world view dependence on other nations for food imports as a national security threat. Countries are scrambling to develop ways to increase food production, and a vital way to do that, Safra said, is to protect bees.

Beewise has already raised more than 40 million dollars from different investors, including a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority and the European Union’s Horizon. The company currently has about 50 employees. Safra said that part of the company’s profits is dedicated to increasing the world’s bee population. 

One avocado farmer in the Galilee region who deals with commercial beekeepers to pollinate his orchards with traditional beehives said that smaller beekeepers are reluctant to try the new technology, and that the product is currently too expensive. Safra agreed that the $400 per month cost of leasing the Beehome might be high, which is why the company is currently focused on larger commercial beekeepers. 

“Over time and scale, costs will go down, allowing our solution to be more ubiquitous,” he said. He hopes to eventually develop a product for beekeepers with a smaller number of beehives as well as for hobbyists.

In addition to their honey, bees create beeswax to encase their larvae in combs, a substance that is still used for binding, sealing and making candles. In fact, the oldest facility in the world for making honey was found in Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley, and dates back to the Iron Age. Archaeologists think the facility was destroyed sometime between 826 BCE and 970 BCE. It is therefore no surprise that Israel, with the oldest known apiary in the world, is the place to reinvent the beehive and ensure the longevity of the global food supply. 

“It is crazy,” Safra admitted. “Just think that five Israelis from a small Israeli kibbutz have the chutzpah to change the world.”