“Pollinators are the consultants of the natural world, supreme reproducers and they don’t charge for it. The plan to convert every street into a bio-corridor and every neighbourhood into an ecosystem required a relationship with them.” Edgar Mora, former Mayor of Curridabat.

The city of Curridabat in Costa Rica is home to the Sweet City Project, an ambitious, innovative rethinking of urban planning and design, which places all inhabitants of the city – human and wild – at the centre of the cityscape.

The World Bee Project is pleased to announce that it will be working together with the Curridabat City Council to transform Curridabat into the Founding World Bee City.

Already famous all over the world, the Sweet City Project officially treats pollinators as citizens. Now, with a network of monitored hives that the World Bee Project will help establish, the city will be able to ‘tune in’ to the information that the bees are collecting as they gather nectar and pollen. Using state-of-the-art sensors, we will be able to monitor everything from the weight of the hives to the sounds the bees make. When taken together, these measurements will provide real-time data on the health of the bees and – by extension – on the health of the city that is their home.

Best of all, Curridabat will be connected to the World Hive Network, the world’s only global bee database. Powered by the Oracle Cloud and sophisticated AI tools, the World Hive Network gives researchers easy access to an ever-updating, comprehensive, global network of monitored hives. The same data that will power Curridabat’s transformation into a Founding World Bee City will also become an important node in the global system, connecting its citizens, pollinators and humans alike, to the global movement to protect pollinators.