Oracle announced a partnership with The World Bee Project CIC in 2018, offering the use of its cloud storage and AI analytics tools to support the organization’s goals and innovations such as its BeeMark honey certification.
Oracle will be offering cloud computing technology and analytics tools to The World Bee Project to enable it to process data in collaboration with its science partner, the University of Reading, to enable science-based evidence to emerge.
The World Bee Project is a private organization that launches a global honeybee monitoring initiative to inform and implement actions to improve pollinator habitats, create more sustainable ecosystems, and improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods by establishing a globally coordinated monitoring program for honeybees and eventually for key pollinator groups.
The World Bee Project is a UK Community Interest Company (CIC), designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good. It is the UK equivalent of a US Benefit Corporation, known as B. Corp. The World Bee Project supports the emerging holistic paradigm where society and the environment are seen as an indivisible whole, and societies and individuals define wellbeing and prosperity.
The aim of the WBP is to create a “world hive network” of remotely monitored honeybee hives and bumble bee nests. This will generate significant new data on the impact of different factors on the health of bees, such as land use, agricultural practices and forage quality. The aim is to gain a deeper understanding of disease, parasites, predator species, and control measures, in part by comparing what’s going on in different parts of the world, where different factors and outcomes can be observed.
This is where the cloud storage and analytics will really come into its own, enabling global storage, access and analysis of the information gathered — and sufficient computing power to really make something of that data, using AI on the big data generated by the world hive network sensors.
So, for the global economy, for the bees themselves, for food producers and food consumers (that’s all of us), it’s great to see this collaboration between a non-profit group, academia and the tech industry to address this issue. It’s also pleasing to see Big Data analytics proving its worth in this way.
The World Bee Project Hive Network remotely collects data from varying environments through interconnected hives equipped with commercially available IoT sensors. The sensors combine colony-acoustics monitoring with other parameters such as brood temperature, humidity, hive weight, and apiary weather conditions. They also monitor and interpret the sound of a bee colony to assess colony behavior, strength and health.
The World Bee Project Hive Network’s multiple local data sources provide a far richer view than any single data source to harness and enable global-scale computation to generate new insights into declining pollinator populations.
After the data has been validated by The World Bee Project database it can be fed into Oracle Cloud, which uses analytics tools including AI and data visualization to provide The World Bee Project with new insights into the relationship between bees and their varying environments. These new insights can be shared with smallholder farmers, scientists, researchers, governments, and other stakeholders.
“The partnership with Oracle will absolutely transform the scene as we can link AI with pollination and agricultural biodiversity,” said Sabiha Malik, founder and executive president of The World Bee Project CIC. “We have the potential to help transform the way the world grows food and to protect the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, but we depend entirely on stakeholders such as banks, agritech, insurance companies, and governments to sponsor and invest in our work so that we can begin to step toward fulfilling our mission.”
Oracle is currently looking at funding models to support the expansion of The World Bee Project Hive Network to ensure a global view of the health of bee populations.
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