European Funded Project to Improve the Health of Bees through Technology is Reaching Romania

- Română -

The European funded project, the Internet of Bees (IoBee), is applying new technologies including beehive monitoring and satellite mapping to help improve the health of bees. IoBee is developing workshops and planning field tests around Europe, and it is soon reaching Romania, the country with the greatest honey production within the EU. IoBee will mark its arrival with its participation to the most important event on beekeeping in Europe, the Beecome European Beekeeping Congress, taking place in Blaj.

IoBee will be sharing experiences and gathering feedback from Romanian and European beekeepers during Beecome. On Friday, March 22, Dr Huw Evans from UK based company, Arnia, will be a speaker in the Congress. He will present the latest developments of IoBee and reveal its potential for beekeepers, beekeeping associations, government and researchers. Dr Evans is an expert in beehive monitoring and a passionate bee researcher.

IoBee aims to deliver unique applications of new technologies to help improve the health of bees in Europe. By applying developments of the Internet of Things (IoT), beekeepers will be able to monitor their hives with useful and timely information in an unprecedented manner. Besides, by implementing new technological developments in sensing technology, IoBee is providing comprehensive monitoring which includes parameters both internal and external of the hive.

Besides providing the necessary tools to better understand what is happening directly in the field, IoBee is developing the integration of satellite mapping to beehive monitoring. New processes in cloud-based services integrate and present all gathered data in an intuitive user interface which allows access to practical information. The system alerts beekeepers about any threat to their hives and is currently developing ways to analyse satellite-gathered information such as phenology and blooming periods in the beekeeper's territory.

IoBee is seeking to be an essential tool to help beekeepers get closer to their colonies, giving them the tools required to better listen to what their bees have to say and the necessary information to help them strive.

The project is also working towards the possibility of establishing the first European Network for the Comprehensive Health Management of Hives. Such a network would integrate data from different sources and projects, thus rendering it more than a valuable tool for researchers and decision-makers.

As IoBee continues its tour around Europe, reaching Romania is an important milestone, considering the high value that beekeeping has in Romania, both economically and culturally. The project now advances its developments in seeking an improvement in the health of bees all around Europe, as well as gathering as much information as possible from all the insights that bees can provide us about themselves and their surrounding environment.

-ENDS-

Contact: Andrés SALAZAR, BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination: comms@bee-life.eu

NOTE TO EDITORS:

IoBee is an EU-funded project that aims to disrupt the beekeeping market by providing practical, timely and easy-to-use monitoring systems. The project focuses on the commercialisation of a new monitoring application, applying technological developments of the Internet of Things (IoT), capable of automatically evaluating the health of the colonies and their threats, becoming the technical framework for an Open Interoperable Surveillance Network for the Health of the Bees.

IoBee aims to create a valuable resource for all stakeholders in the beekeeping sector. It will be able to do this because it functions as a diverse, international and inter-disciplinary consortium. Partners range from technological and technical consultants such as IRIDEON (Spain) and AVIA-GIS (Belgium), monitoring systems manufacturers and developers as ARNIA (UK), educational institutions as TEIC (Crete), to researchers and NGOs. The project also depends on the participation of BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination, through which beekeepers can show their support for the IoBee project, in the hope of confronting the ongoing bee crisis.