Mankind is one of the few creatures that actively alter the natural environment around them to suit their needs (beavers are the only other one that comes to mind). We're so good at this activity we tend to forget that we depend on small creatures for our survival, and that still smaller creatures can imperil them and us both. Honeybees are dying, mites are the cause, and the Internet of Things (IoT) may have the solution.
Whether you use honey or not, honeybees are an essential factor in your nutrition. They collect pollen in order to generate honey, and as a byproduct of their collection activities, they pollinate the plants that produce much of our food. But the bees are dying off in North America and Europe. Colonies have declined as much as 90% in the US since 1962. Some 70 of the top 100 food crops have suffered losses due to this bee crisis.
The causes of this "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) are many and varied, but a key component appears to be the Varroa destructor mite. It hitches a ride on an unsuspecting bee, which gives it passage into a hive. There, it breeds rapidly and infests the colony, leading to CCD.
Once it's infested, ridding a colony of these mites is a substantial challenge. The kinds of pesticides that you might normally want to use can, unfortunately, also harm the bees. Further, the pesticide can contaminate the honey, rendering it unfit for human consumption. A non-chemical approach to mites is needed.
The IoT may offer such an approach. Working with M2M provider Gemalto, agricultural communications company Eltopia has produced a network-connected "smart beehive frame" that replaces a traditional frame in a commercial beehive. The "MiteNot" frame provides sensors and a heater element that communicate through a gateway to an application on the network. The sensors feed information to the application, which in turn commands the heater to protect the hive from infestation. One frame can protect an entire hive and one gateway can support the apiary's whole hive collection.
The key to it all is the mite's and bee's breeding cycles. The female mite enters a bee's brood honeycomb cell a day before the bee caps the cell to allow the bee larva in it to develop. Male mites in the cells fertilize the eggs the females lay on the larvae after capping closes the cell. When the bee hatches, it will carry with it a new generation of mites to further infect the colony. By monitoring the temperatures of some 32 elements in the hive, the MiteNot identifies the right time and place to apply heat in the hive to interrupt the mites' breeding cycles before the fertilization step, sterilizing the mite eggs and halting the infestation.
There has been a lot of criticism about the hype surrounding the IoT, but applications such as the MiteNot show that the trend is real and the implications profound. The ability to create a small, low-power, wirelessly-connected device that can access and leverage powerful computing algorithms on the network opens a whole world of applications that were inconceivable a few years ago. The idea of the Internet toaster may be silly, but the potential for the IoT is not. In fact, the IoT may well save the bees and, by extension, mankind.
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