After winning a $100,000 investment from the IU Building Entrepreneurs in Software and Technology Competition last February, IU alumni and a current student launched a technology startup to monitor commercial beehive conditions.
The Bee Corp., founded by alumni Ellie Symes, Simon Kuntz and Wyatt Wells and current student Lucas Moehle, is now prepared to begin research and development into building and testing sensors for hives to improve understanding of needs and behaviors of bees. The ultimate goal of studying the bees is to reduce the negative effects of colony collapse disorder and to enhance beehive health in the United States and worldwide.
Wells said in an IU Newsroom press release CCD has caused an annual hive loss of around 30 percent. Per a 2014 White House statement, honeybees contribute more than $15 billion to the U.S. economy each year.
“Simultaneously, demand for honey and crops that depend on honeybees for pollination has grown steadily, resulting in an increasingly volatile industry,” Wells said in the release. “Our aim is to gather information that we can use to help reduce this volatility and to do so in a sustainable way for both the bees and the market that depends on them.”
He said the company sources its sensor hardware from suppliers both inside and outside the United States. The corporation owns and manages more than 100 hives throughout central and southern Indiana.
Wells said the company will spend the next six months dedicating its resources to research, and in the third quarter it will split the resources between research, data analysis and prototype development.
“We collect a comprehensive data set to gain a stronger understanding about the factors that contribute to a strong, healthy hive as well as factors that cause hive mortality,” Wells said in the release. “We will perform research to test the hypotheses from the data we collect.”
Jamie Zega
