BeeSage: Data-driven Beekeeping for Productivity and Sustainability

BeeSage is an early stage startup which is contesting the The Hague Innovators Award in the pre-startup category. They are evangelizing data-driven beekeeping for productivity and sustainability, Reprex is an impact scale-up in the other category of this competition for more mature startups that is building collaborative, open scholarly data infrastructure, so-called data observatories to support the needs of various data-driven policy, business, or scientific innovation.

We met in the ImpactCity initiative of The Hague, and we’d like to build on The Hague impact startup ecosystem by combining our respective strengths so we decided to join forces! We both want to win in The Hague Innovators’ Challenge in 2022, but we only compete for the votes of the audience. Through our cooperation, we would like to increase the viability of BeeSage in the pre-startup category and increase the value proposition of Reprex in the startup category to the jury in ImpactFest.

BeeSage modular beehive monitoring system boosts productivity and honey yield to benefit the Earth through data-driven pollination. Their software and hardware such as Smart Beehive Scales help beekeepers mitigate risks and enable informed decisions, while turning every apiary into a weather station.

They are also building HiveMap as a data analytics software, which enables beekeeper associations, environmental organizations and other stakeholders to turn beehive and remove sensing data into valuable insights. This product can be greatly enhanced through the latest data from Europe’s Copernicus satellites, from meteorological and air pollution sources. This is where Reprex’s Green Deal Data Observatory comes into the picture.

Beekeepers associations, small research groups, or Ecotech startups cannot afford to build a full team of data engineers, data scientists, and statisticians to tap into components of raw inflation data (to find honey price or food value chain data), to create validated and continuously maintained data pipelines from environmental satellites, the data warehouses of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency. They cannot hire small-area statisticians and ecological regression experts to create ecological and key business indicators for small tracts of land that are directly relevant to the health of a honeybee colony.

Reprex produces open-source scientific software, and various collaborative data engineering infrastructures to get legally open governmental data and open science data in a timely, usable format to ecological researchers, beekeeper associations, and Ecotech startups like BeeSage. The European Union legally opened up vast arrays of scientific and governmental data sources for commercial and scientific reuse, but investment into re-processing and validating data that was originally collected for a different primary cause requires plenty of private investment.

Reprex’s data observatories, particularly the Green Deal Data Observatory are public-private partnerships that foster the collective collection, processing, peer-review, and reuse of novel big data, like BeeSage’s beehive data, and reusable statistical and environmental data. We hope to place the permanent institution of this PPP in the Hague, which is already the World’s Smartest City, and which wants to remain a global centre of excellence of peace, justice, and sustainability in the era of big data and AI.