When Karl Wenner looks at his farm on Upper Klamath Lake within the mountains of southern Oregon, he sees a landscape in transition.
He and his partners converted a part of their fields of barley into wetlands along the shore of the lake to filter runoff and protect the standard of the water that eventually flows back into the Klamath River, which empties into the Pacific on California’s coast. The project is an element of a bigger effort to wash up the river, remove dams and convey back salmon.
At Lakeside Farms, that transformation is being guided by a surprising source of knowledge: the pollen collected by tens of hundreds of honeybees. A Belgian start-up called BeeOdiversity enlisted Wenner, who can be a beekeeper, to assist in a survey within the Klamath River Basin. Each colony, with 50,000 bees, harvests pollen over an area of greater than two square miles, collecting as many as 4 billion tiny samples in a yr. The resulting data creates a transparent, accurate picture of the plants and pollution present within the environment.
“I didn’t know anything about what they were going to do,” Wenner says. “I assumed well, that sounds cool, what the heck, I’ll try it. After which they began sending me the info, and it was like ‘Holy cow! That is powerful stuff.’”
The bees’ data revealed rare native plants that Wenner didn’t know were there, in addition to invasive species that needed to be removed to create balance.
Farmers are amongst a growing variety of beneficiaries of BeeOdiversity’s unique system of information collection. The corporate now has clients in 20 countries. In Europe, public water utilities and water bottling firms like Nestlé are using the system to watch and protect sources of mineral water. Industrial clients use the bees to envision compliance with regulations and monitor the environment to preserve soils and biodiversity.
With expertise and tools shared by Microsoft and Accenture, the corporate has developed what it calls BeeOimpact, a system that’s using machine learning to extrapolate data over much larger areas. This assesses the impact of an activity on local biodiversity. BeeOdiversity now has its first clients for this platform. Within the Azure cloud, it uses machine learning in Azure Data Factory to discover areas where pesticides could also be in high concentrations. This brings the advantages of bee-gathered data to much broader areas at a much lower cost.
Progressive technology and the genius of nature are working together to create a knowledge set found nowhere else.
Saving the bees
BeeOdiversity cofounder Bach Kim Nguyen wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the explanations behind bee colony collapses, a world problem. The causes include using pesticides, habitat loss and increased vulnerability to pests and diseases. When he finished his studies, Nguyen made saving bees his mission in life.
He says he’s at all times been keen about these social insects and describes a bee colony as an excellent organism. Each of the 50,000 bees in a colony has a task, and all work together to support the hive. “They’re model for us,” he says.
Bees are also essential to us. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 are pollinated by bees, in keeping with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Nguyen invented a system that knocks a tiny little bit of pollen off the employee bees as they return to the hive – enough for research, but not a lot as to rob the bees of nutrition. Using laboratory evaluation and AI models to ascertain some correlations between results, BeeOdiversity can discover greater than 500 pesticides and heavy metals, in addition to the plants in the world.
Once the info is analyzed, BeeOdiversity scientists make recommendations to clients and stakeholders to cut back pesticide use and improve the general environment. “In that way we’re working on aspects like biodiversity and pollution,” Nguyen says. “And ultimately, we save the bees.”
Since its founding in 2012, BeeOdiversity has won quite a few awards, including an Ashoka fellowship, research funding from the European Union and being included in Microsoft’s Share AI and Entrepreneurship for Positive Impact Accelerator programs. BeeOdiversity was also chosen for the AB InBev 100+ Accelerator program.
As a part of that program, the beverage giant AB InBev and BeeOdiversity are collaborating on a pilot project in and near the AB InBev hops-production area near George, on South Africa’s southern coast.
Alyssa Jooste, Africa sustainability manager for AB InBev, says it’s the one place on the continent where hops for beer may be grown. Invasive plants, like pine trees, black wattle and eucalyptus, use as much as 60% more water than native species in an area where it’s scarce, she says. For greater than 10 years, AB InBev has been working with the World Wildlife Fund South Africa to clear areas of those species to guard precious water sources and restore native species.
As a part of its pilot project with AB InBev, BeeOdiversity is using data gathered by six bee colonies to gauge the impact of the removal of invasive species in addition to the presence of pesticides within the environment. The bees collect pollen at farms and nature reserves nearby. BeeOdiversity can be using DNA evaluation to guage the soil in the world.
“The knowledge from the soil sampling in addition to the pollen and biodiversity evaluation will infer how successful our clearing initiatives have been in restoring biodiversity and soil health,” Jooste says. “It’s going to form a baseline on which we are able to make decisions going forward.”