Beewise pulls in $80M investment for robotic beehives | Hacker News Reader

Beewise pulls in $80M investment for robotic beehives

timesofisrael.com

53 pointsprostoalex13 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30865323

A few years ago my cousin decided to have a wild garden. She just removes some weeds, but lets most things grow unchecked.

The garden is now always full of bees in summer.

So sure, we can invest millions in robotic beehives. But we could also let nature do it's job.

I love what your cousin did, but there’s a big difference between that and beekeeping. Not even the same types of bees. The bees kept for honey / wax production and pollination are more like livestock than “nature.”

My point was that if the goal is to "save bee populations", as the article claims, then we can do that by providing the natural habitat that bees need.

Or we could just stop killing them with pesticides.

Exactly like livestock. If you take a look at the family tree of comercial honebee queens (yes, one exists, breeders track lineage) you will find that there are lots of loops and backtracks. Basically, lots of inbreeding. Bees are bread for 1) Production capacity. 2) Easy handling

The problems that beekeepers have been seeing the last 10 years may be in part a problem of genetic diversity.

Thats not the main story though: Wild bee populations (along with nearly all other insects) are having a bad time too. Habitat loss and pesticides are thought to be the reason.

Beekeeping may even be a contributing factor to some wild populations decline due to competition over ever more scarse resources.

When I read the headline I thought this would be about using micro drones for polination instead of real bees. Maybe one of the last animals still helping in major scale farming is about to fall to the machines.

However this is instead about a more closely symbiotic relationship with bees. Cool!

I'm surprised they're not doing something more ground breaking regarding hive design.

https://youtu.be/9ItlOFLTUAs

A big issue for bees is disease. If the sick bees can be automatically stopped from entering the hive then the spread of disease will be stopped

Ants have some methods of doing this exactly, with some guards at the entrance carrying off infected ants before they can enter. Seen in the documentary "fantastic fungi".

And Varroa destructor mites. If Beewise can figure a simple but effective method for eradicating them from the hive, they will solve one of the biggest stressors on bees. Beekeeping, as has been said, is really pest management.

These can be killed easily with vaporized oxalic acid in two treatments spaced a week apart (iirc, dad keeps bees not me). This pretty much eliminated any hive loss for years now, and we’re convinced this is the fix for colony collapse disorder (at least in our area).

$120MM in three priced rounds (plus two seed rounds). I wonder how much common has any more.

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