Hostabee

THE CHALLENGE

Bees disappear in the countryside, mainly due to extensive agriculture, and this is a global ecological disaster. Besides that, urban farming is an emerging trend, and bees raised in cities seem to be healthier and more productive. In this context, Hostabee aims to foster the development of urban beekeeping by providing specific technology and a disruptive business model in which beekeepers act as service providers. Hostabee integrates high quality food production in the urban circular economy. Beehives are hosted by companies or individuals on their roofs or in their gardens and the beehives are managed by professional beekeepers using Hostabee to remotely control the status of the beehives and to organize their logistics.

THE SOLUTION

Hostabee is the world’s first connected solution able to protect and manage beehives in the best way possible for the bees and the environment. Placed in the beehive, Hostabee monitors temperature and humidity in the beehive every hour. Those 2 parameters are enough to know the health state of the bee colony. Temperature and humidity changes may tell that hive-off is about to come, or laying is starting. Hostabee works on a Sigfox/LoRa connection: low energy and zero waves in the hive. Hostabee is a global solution, and a dedicated network can be established for massive beekeepers.

WHY FIWARE

The Hostabee team was very interested in finding the open source technology to support the development of its services. In addition to the use of the FIWARE technology, the Hostabee team was also interested in leveraging and contributing to a new kind of community, the FIWARE Community, which is a mix of developers, startups, investors, corporates, and local governments.

As an IoT solution, Hostabee is based on a connected device – B-Keep – based on an optimized specific electronic board with embedded sensors to collect temperature, humidity levels and sound levels.

The B-Keep board also has an integrated antenna and its processor is able to manage LoRa and Sigfox communication format and protocol. To isolate the application from the LPWAN network operators systems (Sigfox and LoRa), Hostabee has implemented its own IoT backend based on FIWARE enablers. The data collected by the Device are stored on the Google Big Query platform in order to treat it through Google Prediction and Craft AI APIs to generate decision trees. The generated decision trees are used to provide proactive advices and alerts about the status of the beehive. To reach interoperability – especially with weather stations – the instant data are published through the Context Broker and the historical data are accessible (for scientific use only) through the CKAN Open Data platform.