so what can you tell me about BeeWise yeah it is it's a device that houses
hives and there's a robotic arm inside of it, that automates most of the manual
work that beekeepers would do, like moving frames splitting hives merging
hives feeding harvesting it's all done by the robot. So you get to see this this
little app this is the actual frames of all your hives and you can see how much
brood whole it and honey there is in each frame you can actually dig into a
specific hive and see all the frames these are the pictures of the specific
frames you can see the pictures and then this is our AI after it analyzed those
pictures so we know in the cell level every what's in every single cell
whether it's eggs open cab brood open brood everything honey pollen, so the
pull the framed, take a picture, do the analysis, put it back the robot does. How
many hives total? up to 40 hives.
it's part of the box no these are the hives, there's no real hives anymore
it's just frames it's like a bookshelf frames and what and there's dividers you
see so these are the black with are the dividers so this is like a lot of frames
if you go into the box and see this you can actually see all these
frames and these are what to find one colony from the other now this is a weak
colony for example at 30 week if you can grab the brood frame from here the robot
does it and you can just shove it in here the strength of this frame we can
see here for example this hive lost its Queen
you see that they have no Queen. If one have a problem all will have the problems? well depends which problem right it's kind of
a regular batch right they're pretty close together they're batched on you
know so yeah it's similar the thing is, if you have a problem here you know it in real-time where
you can tell you know American brood we could tell the Varroa, we can tell you
what's going on because it's a robot that takes a picture you know you don't
have to send people to actually take out so you know today just to know what's
going on at your yard somebody has to get into a car drive for a few hours get
dressed apply smoke and there they open the first high two later the first race
tomorrow, you get to see this any time you like readily available 24/7
you see their entire yard and you can make decisions you can just make a much
more informed decision and then you can apply the remotely without actually
going to yard now there's still things you always have to go for example to
bring in new queen, we don't know how to do that yet automatically, I'm
sure it's certain things we'll figure out that we still don't automate. The idea is try and
think as many mundane you know labor-intensive tasks and let the robot
do them
it's cool in the same time scary about it
we're bee keeping is going I have no problem with technology but I know a lot
of people see this as a problem.
one of our founders is a beekeeper and what happens is he used
to send people to the field and they do stuff and then he'd go and check on them
figure out oh they did it all wrong because beekeeping is not something you
know you learn in you know by reading a book a three year old beekeeper and a 30
year old beekeeper they have a totally different experience and expertise so
you want all your staff to be 30 year old beekeepers beekeepers with 30 years
of experience right and so just streamlining the operation
is important so it's not you use less beekeepers it's the idea is that but you
take your experienced beekeepers and you apply them to grow your apiary to
bringing more hives while the mundane tasks we could just do this. How much? we
charge $10 a month for hive
so we don't we own the device the actual frames are yours you just take your
existing frames from your hives and push it in them so you know you I mean
the beekeeper they own their hives of their bees we provide the whole
infrastructure the service software you know the hardware and we charge for it
$400/month. per device. and right now we're actually working
with some pilot partners and get it for free to try this out for us to learn it
in improving the service I'll be very interested on that in Florida to
conduct research. Some of our partners our research facilities because you can
see it real time what's going on and yeah the other thing we're trying to do
now is we're trying to throw in more technology to identify the mites inside
the capped brood. if you can identify the mites inside the capped brood you can do
wonderful things right just imagine you don't need to do any treatments you can
just pop those little cells and the bees will get rid of the mites. Right now
we're not dealing with the mites in any way to that apply as pesticide against
that philosophically what we're trying to find ways to mechanically get rid of the bite
if we can get that for us that would be kind of the golden how we go even as a
as a split machine this is all ready to have the value right there yeah what
this is your hive you take the divider just move it in the middle and now you
have two separate hide it takes the robot a minute to do and you split a
height you want to split on 40 go ahead and split them we have we're bringing a
couple here to California and March this March and some come March we're giving
your you like the cat we have a waiting list for like the next couple of years
for all these machines we can't produce them fast enough
right now we're still manufactured with one by one the small workshop at some
point in the next couple of years we'll start getting to mass production