Bees are critical to our continued existence. They pollinate our food, taking pollen from one plant to another, allowing them to reproduce. Without them, humanity would, quite frankly, begin to starve. So anything that helps them is welcome. A company called Oracle technology, in conjunction with the World Bee Project, have created a system that pools the data of sensors into one, big, accurate database, keeping beekeepers up to date – talk about a hive mind! Adam Murphy spoke to John Abel, Vice-President of Cloud Technology for Oracle UK, Ireland and Israel. Turns out we have a lot to thank bees for!

John – If you look at the world we have today, the critical element is food for the growing population. One third of our food is actually down to pollination and the pollinators. The honey bees is one of the key resources that do pollination. The problem is in England alone between 1985 and 2005 there’s been 54 percent reduction in those pollinators.

Adam – And could you tell us then about the tech you’ve developed to help them out?

John – So on our hives that we have here at Oracle, Reading, we have the ability to capture sound, we have the ability to capture humidity, the weight of the hive, and also we can look at the external factors like weather and rain. What this means is the ecosystem of the hive, specifically sound which is the exciting one, we’re capturing and putting to the Oracle cloud.

If you think about it, two hives give us a good set of data. But more and more hives that add on top of the World Bee Project hive network allow us to grow an ecosystem where we start seeing on mass how hives are happy or unhappy depending on the environment they live in. So we can start seeing very quickly how to inform the beekeeper of where to place the hives for the best impact to yield great honey, but also to have great pollination.