Last week I received a piece of information from Oracle that really caught my attention. He did not ‘sell’ me a motorcycle, as many companies do that do nothing more than send press releases and releases to journalists, and with which little can be done when it comes to writing something ‘Very Interesting’. The news that reached me said that the aforementioned company and The World Bee Project announced a “unique program in the world to understand the decline in the population of bees and help protect them.” And how are Oracle and the aforementioned British institution going to do it? Using artificial intelligence (AI), a lot of data, more processing capacity, putting everything in the cloud and visualizing with modern tools the useful information to find solutions.
For this, ‘World Bee Project Hive Network’ will collect data remotely using a network of connected hives, which will be sent to the cloud, from Oracle of course, where analytical tools, artificial intelligence and data visualization will be used to give researchers new information on the relationship between honey bees and their environments.
We have already talked in this blog about other similar projects to protect the Congo elephants from extinction, or to safeguard the swallows in the Disney parks in Oregon, initiatives led by other technology companies such as Microsoft and Google. In the case of bees, the researchers will be allowed to ‘hear’ them, analyzing complex acoustic data captured within the smart hives, including the movement of their wings and legs. By combining this information with other precision measures such as temperature, humidity and honey production, it will be possible to monitor bee colonies, detect patterns and predict behaviors. This will allow beekeepers and conservationists to take action to protect colonies, such as avoiding swarms at inappropriate times of the year or eliminating predators of invasive species such as the Asian hornet. The value of the data is to inform the beekeepers of the different states of the colony throughout the year and help their management.
The data and insights gained from the project will be made available to other research and conservation initiatives working to protect bees around the world. By sharing resources and fostering collaboration, The World Bee Project Hive Network plans to multiply its impact and enable greater action to save bees.
“Our lives are intrinsically connected to bees,” says Sabiha Rumani Malik, founder and CEO at The World Bee Project. “By protecting bees and other pollinators, we can help solve problems such as the world’s food supply and poverty. , and reduce biodiversity loss and damage to ecosystems. Our partnership with Oracle Cloud is an extraordinary marriage between nature and technology. It will make the public care more and more about pollinators, enable advanced research and, fundamentally, act on a scale that was previously impossible to achieve. The more we understand the relationships between pollination, food and human well-being, the more we can do to protect bees and pollinators, and help protect our planet and ourselves. “
Pollinators are declining at an alarming rate; a serious concern given its importance to global food security, as bees are responsible for pollinating one third of the world’s food supply. In addition, of the 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world’s population, bees pollinate 70. And, according to experts, England’s honey bees are fading faster than anywhere else in Europe, with a decline 54% between 1985 and 2005. The Oracle plan and the World Bee Project, using the latest AI technologies, show that increasingly inhospitable conditions for bees are responsible for their decline, driven by habitat loss of flowers, intensified growing methods, climate change and increased use of pesticides.
Although it should not have gone to such extremes, technology, in this case artificial intelligence, can help alleviate the problem and also save bees.
