Building automated solutions to safeguard honey bees and agriculture.
Honey bee eggs laid in a ForgeBee Egg Laying Plate
75% of crops, collectively worth $XX, require pollinators, but growers are struggling to find the pollination their crops need.
To meet commercial agriculture’s huge pollination services must be scalable, reliable, and affordable.
ForgeBee is industrializing pollination beekeeping to meet these needs. By rearing honey bees under controlled conditions, removed from environmental stressors, we aim to produce bees, “on-demand”, wherever and whenever pollination is required—at scale, reliably, and at a competitive price.
What sets ForgeBee apart?
Commercial pollination is tough on the honey bee. A colony of bees must survive winter to be available for the next year’s pollination events, but nearly 50% of colonies die annually due to pathogens, parasites, pesticides, and poor nutrition.
ForgeBee’s first step is to remove the honey bees’ reproduction cycle from these stressors. By rearing our bees under controlled conditions, we can safeguard their survival and produce them year-round.
Our second step centers around a natural specialization of the honey bee worker—the Forager. Foragers comprise about 30% of a regular colony’s population, and live an average of two weeks.
The proprietary methods we’re developing significantly increase the proportion of foragers in a colony. So, instead of using large colonies with a small percentage of foragers, we use small colonies with a large percentage of foragers for pollination.
Colonies of foragers produced reliably under controlled conditions gives growers the pollinators they need at the exact right time.
How are we doing it?
Our approach rests on these three technological pillars:
1. Queen Monitoring Cage (QMC)
The QMC is the foundation of our system. Developed in the Robinson lab at the University of Illinois, the QMC enables the housing of honey bee queens under controlled conditions. It is a patented and stand-alone system that we are already selling to honey bee researchers as a tool to accelerate and improve their research. The QMC allows us to efficiently collect honey bee eggs and transfer them to the next step, the Bee Factory.
2. Bee Factory
The Bee Factory is a set of robots that rear honey bee eggs to adulthood. This system, enclosed within a sterile environment, ensures bees are raised divorced from detrimental pathogens, parasites, and pesticides. Workers are reared en masse with minimal human supervision. This is key to achieving our goal of producing healthy and capable foragers at the lowest cost possible.
3. Deployable Pollination Unit (DPU)
Finally, the foragers reared in the Bee Factory populate small hives specifically designed to be delivered directly to fields for pollination. We call these hives Deployable Pollination Units (DPUs). These colonies do not reproduce, and so the foragers live out their natural lifespan and perish as they would in a regular colony. This means that after a pollination event, the hives will be empty and can be disposed of or returned to ForgeBee.
