Bees play a vital role in pollinating many food crops and The World Bee Project has teamed up with University of Reading, BeeHero and Oracle for Research to optimize the pollination of fruit crops while also ensuring a healthy and sustainable environment for bees and other insects.

The Oracle Cloud provides a wide range of analytics and data science capabilities, enabling collaborative research across these teams. The three-year project aims to deliver a better understanding of the delicate balance between farming practices, pollinators and the local environment, as well as new tools and guidelines to support this.

The project benefits from the latest in-depth academic research from Reading University, combined with the cutting edge sensor technology provided by BeeHero, who provide pollination services to commercial farms. The project requires both traditional on-site survey data, which is collected manually across the UK, as well as large volumes of IoT sensor data, which is automatically captured every 15 minutes. The sensor data includes hive temperature, humidity and in-hive acoustics, as well as data related to more than half a million trips the bees make every day. The project also collects hourly third-party weather data as well as satellite images.

After the data has been processed by World Bee Project partner BeeHero, it’s transferred into an autonomous database in the Oracle Cloud, which uses analytics tools including AI and data visualization. This provides researchers at the University of Reading with new insights into the bees and their journeys from their hives to the different crops they pollinate. It is hoped this collaborative research project will help the global agricultural community to better understand pollinators and the vital role they play in pollination.