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Beekeeping is getting cleverer; thanks to smart hive monitoring technology that is being developed by a Bahrain-based start-up, Honey Flow Africa, and deployed across the MENA region.
When serial entrepreneur Amaete Umanah, engineer John Uduma and agricultural economist Joshua Agbomedarho met in Nigeria in 2016, they may not have known what the next few years held in store for them, but they saw an entrepreneurial fire in each other.
This and a need to make a difference in agriculture across the region led them down a self-guided journey into the lives of nature’s smartest engineers.
Around the same time, father and son duo Stuart and Cedar Anderson from Australia launched a KickStarter campaign to develop Flow Hive, a redesign of the traditional box bee hive that minimises interruptions to the bees, using a tap to extract the honey. Essentially, it’s like getting honey on tap from your beehive. While bees have been farmed for more than 3,000 years of recorded history, this might be the biggest technological innovation in the field in more than 150 years.
Seeing this innovation inspired the Nigerian ‘agripreneurs’. John, the CTO of the company said: “We thought, well if the honey is already being collected and harvested using this technology, why not add a few sensors and bring an artificial intelligence (AI) platform into the equation, to monitor things like temperature, hive weight and most importantly, threats to the hive?”
GulfWeekly’s cover story this week tells the story of a Bahraini farmer using traditional methods and discusses the impact of colony collapse disorder (CCD).
Honey Flow looked at CCD as a data problem. No one to this date has been able to establish a uniform theory about what is happening to the bees. But Amaete, John and Joshua realised that by implementing sensors, they could monitor multiple threats. Using audio sensors, they could monitor frequencies for a plethora of functions like detect pests and monitor signals from the queen bee to the hive including a vacate signal, after which bee keepers have 48 hours to ensure all the honey is not consumed and the hive vacated by the entire colony. On top of this, a bee counter monitors overall health of the hive.
Using temperature and humidity sensors, they could ensure optimal growth conditions for larvae and production climate for the worker bees. And using a weight sensor, they could detect when a hive was ready for harvesting.
Powering all of this is the Beeteck Hive Monitor, which collects all this data and transmits it to the cloud, using a GSM connection to ensure the data is available on any internet-enabled device.
In Nigeria and other MENA countries, where hives are usually in remote locations, this enables bee farmers to keep an eye on their hives while minimising the need for repeated trips and interruptions to the inner workings of the hives.
Joshua, the COO of the company added: “We want to use data to predict bee behaviour patterns and use this, as opposed to a calendar, to optimise the output of each hive. There are a number of problems bee farmers face, including difficulty in monitoring hives, low honey production and storage of honey and bee products. We want to address these problems by giving farmers a technology platform that understands various bee behaviours, interprets data like weight, temperature, humidity, acoustics, foraging activity, rainfall, air intensity, air direction and geographic location data, develops insights from this information and just tells farmers what they need to know and do to address problems.”
The ‘beepreneurs’ spent nearly three years researching the problem, bringing noted apiculturist David Musa on board to help them decode the workings of a hive.
After their research was complete, they started to develop a prototype and applied to the Brinc accelerator.
They were accepted in the programme in March and have been working on a deployable pilot prototype ever since, which they hope to set up in Bahrain and Nigeria.
Bee farming in the MENA and Sub Sahara African region faces a slew of problems. From the lack of bee farmers to the lack of statistical data and lack of knowledge about methods of collection, processing and storage of honey products, these issues have led to a high demand and low supply of local honey. Almost 90 per cent of the honey in this region is imported, representing a huge market for the trio to digitally empower.
When asked why they chose Bahrain as the centre of their operations, they admitted that the acceptance into Brinc was the primary reason but also noted that Bahrain’s young start-up ecosystem status and multiple available grants from Tamkeen gave them an opportunity to grow along with the local ecosystem. Additionally, the amount of honey imported by Bahrain and the lack of big-name local bee farmers represented a market opportunity for the trio.
Marwa Aleskafi, head of the IOT programme at Brinc, said: “The size of Bahrain makes it an ideal testing ground for start-ups like Honey Flow Africa. The majority of bee farmers in Bahrain are hobbyists and by enabling these farmers to make smarter and remote decisions regarding their bees, Amaete and his team can prove their model.”
The team is already in talks with universities in Bahrain and Nigeria to create Bee Resource Centres that would help amateurs get into the trade.
Amaete, the CEO, added: “We want to help all kinds of bee farmers optimise their output, but most of all, we want to bring in people who have no previous bee background, give them the tools needed to succeed and essentially, create a network of connected smart bee farms, that benefit from data insights, remote monitoring and different methods of apiculture.”
To find out more about Honey Flow Africa, visit https://www.honeyflowafrica.com
