The declining bee population is not just a problem for honey lovers; it's a threat to the global food supply.
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.
The World Bee Project is the first private organization to launch 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 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 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.
Oracle is currently looking at funding models to support the expansion of The World Bee Project Hive Network to ensure a truly global view of the health of bee populations.
