The Buzz around Pollinators 🦋🐝🐦🦇
How companies are supporting pollinator populations (and a map of who's who)
The world depends on its pollinators. More than just hyperbole, pollination is an essential ecological survival function without which food systems would globally decline. By moving pollen grains from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma, pollinators enable plant fertilization for the production of seeds and fruit. 80% of the crops grown in the world require pollination by animals, including both vertebrate pollinators like birds and bats, and invertebrate pollinator species such as bees, butterflies and moths.
Worryingly, over the past decade, studies show that across all types, pollinators are declining across the globe: One IPBES report estimates that 40% of invertebrate pollinators and 16.5% of vertebrate pollinators are threatened with extinction.
In this quick dip, we’ll be dissecting the causes of pollinator decline, and providing an overview of startups aiming to reverse that trend. Stay tuned to the end for some of our concluding thoughts as well.
Three problems plaguing pollinator populations
Habitat degradation
As with almost all non-human species today, the natural ecosystems that pollinators rely on are rapidly deteriorating due to the expansion of intensive agriculture, industrialization, and urbanisation.
Pollinators rely on flowering plants in their habitats to find adequate nutrition. As they lose their habitats and food sources, their mortality rates have increased as malnourishment decreases their immunity. Species like honey bees have also been observed to abandon their hives when their surrounding habitat is under duress.
Habitat destruction has also affected the ability of pollinators to reproduce, as they lose crucial protection for nesting and overwintering periods. If they don’t have the ability to build up their population, it’s becomes near impossible for them to rebound from other stressors that are causing their decline.
This makes it harder for them to survive winters and can expose them to other dangers year-round, like predation and conflict with humans over habitats.
Pest & Pathogen (Disease) Infestations
Insect pollinators can be impact by a wide variety of viral, bacterial, and parasitic infections which cause disease. Perhaps most famously, Varroa destructor mites are one of the most destructive pests of honey bees, with infestation levels estimated to be 80% among commercial beehives. Adult female varroa mites lay their eggs in the brood cells of bee hives, which then feed on bee larvae, pupae, resulting in deformation of the wings and bodies of bees when they develop and emerge as adults. Traditionally, Varroa is cured using Apivar Strips: a pesticide strip inserted into a hive, but these leave a residue on the coats of bees, impacting the quality of honey produced.
To make matters worse, they themselves transmit disease that further weaken the immunity of their hosts to the 60 other viruses, such as the American foulbrood (AFB), a resilient spore-forming bacterium (Paenibacillus larvae) that is a serious brood disease of larval honey bees, that have been identified in honey bees.
These diseases can also transfer horizontally into other pollinator populations, via the flora they both visit. Some of the diseases mentioned above have also been identified in stingless bees and bumble bees in the wild.
Invasive Species
So far, we’ve brought up quite a few examples of the issues faced by bees, and especially honey bees. To be fair, honey bees are so ubiquitous with the word “pollinator” that when most people think of pollinators, the yellow and black striped honey Apis mellifera is the first one that comes to mind.
But in reality, we rely on far more pollinators than that single association would suggest. With native bees occurring on every continent except Antarctica, there are about 20,000 bee species worldwide, 85% of which are solitary species. And beyond bees, there are many other unappreciated orders of pollinators, such as bats, which are responsible for pollinating over 500 known plant species, including species of mango, banana, durian, guava, and agave (used to make tequila!)
The decline of honey bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) shone a much needed public spotlight on the issue of pollinator decline, and also drove many attempts to address the issues highlighted above.
But in many places outside of Afro-Eurasia, honey bees are an invasive species, which threaten wild bee survival as they put pressure on limited local resources and the flowers they rely on.
While efforts to bolster pollinator populations are commendable, when managed poorly they can do more harm than good, especially in urban contexts where the availability of local flowers are especially limited. It is crucial that these efforts are coordinated sensitively.
Of course, pollinators face a myriad of challenges beyond what we’ve already highlighted, including pollution, pesticide exposure, and climate change, but these go beyond the scope of what we’ve chosen to focus on today.
We selected the above issues not only for the sake of brevity, but also for its relevance to the start-ups and innovators we have come across that are explicitly focusing on pollinators. While there are of course companies that are focused on decreasing pollution or combatting climate change, these are very wide innovation areas that are better explored elsewhere.
With that being said, let’s dive in to 5 areas of innovation that we’ve explored for pollinator survival, health, and efficiency.
Private Sector Solutions to Support Pollinator Populations
Monitoring For Commercial Honey Beekeeping
Hive monitoring solutions can provide vital real-time information on colony status for beekeepers, measuring factors such as health, temperature, and weight. This information can be also be used to generate predictive algorithms that can be used to make pre-emptive adjustments to foster pollinator health and improve honey harvests. Companies in this category include BeeHero and HiveGenie.
Pollination for Agriculture
Beyond beekeeping for honey production, a subsegment of beekeepers also service a pollination market for agriculture worth over $600M, for crops such as almonds and berries. Companies such as Agrisound also provide monitoring solutions for pollinators, but within the context of farms. Using their analytics, they provide prescriptive guidance for increasing pollinator activity, thus increasing both agricultural yield and biodiversity. Some, like Olombria (which works on hoverflies) and Beeflow, also provide chemical volatiles to guide their target pollinators to specific crops, rather than to non-target plant species.
Health Solutions (Varroa mites, American Foulbrood, etc)
An emerging treatment for the Varroa infestation is a form of thermal treatment (such as that created by Vatorex and Beefutures) where hives are connected to devices that control the temperature of the hives to eradicate the Varroa mite. Another emerging form of treatment is through gaseous emission (ToBe), which reports high efficacy without residues or negative impact to bee health.
The American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood disease lack strong cures as it stands. If the disease is detected early and the colony is strong, it can be treated with the antibiotic Terramycin, but if the colony is heavily infested or is weak, the only alternative is to burn the combs to kill the infection. To avoid diseases such as the American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood, some startups are proposing a bee vaccination in the larvae stage to develop a stronger immunity (such as Dalan).
Corporate Reporting and/or Beekeeping/landscaping Solutions
This is a broad category that refers to pollinator companies servicing corporate clients. One way they do this is by using pollinators as indicator species, or “source” species for environmental monitoring. Beeodiversity, for example, conducts biomonitoring: by analysing the pollen collected by bees, they unpack number and type of plant species present, as well as the type, concentration, and impact of pollutants in the area (they also provide a number of other relevant solutions).
In general though, the biggest subsegment in this category is the companies providing urban beekeeping or landscaping solutions, such as Alveole, which has put beehives on 2,200 commercial buildings. With some corporates also already reporting their impacts on pollinator health, many startups in this category are also providing measurement services for more direct metrics on the pollinators they attract or provide (BeePrecise, for example).
Of course, as we’ve already mentioned before, it’s important to bear in mind that urban beekeeping has put strain on populations of local pollinators in certain areas, so this is an area of investment best approached cautiously. Companies like Bermondsey Street Bees utilize publicly available forage maps and beehive-density maps to determine where they will install hives, and also works with clients to ensure forage material are installed within a four kilometer flying range where necessary.
Alternative Honey
The smallest solution area we’ve come across so far, alternative honey refers to “bee-free” honey derived from microorganisms in cultivation/fermentation bioreactors, to create a chemically equivalent honey product (See: Melibio and Bee-io). They’re not just providing vegans with a choice - they’re trying to combat the beekeeping industry, to help native populations flourish. It’s an interesting proposition, and one that is going against a $9B honey market.
Some final thoughts
The space for innovation for impact on pollinators is heavily skewed to solutions for honey bees. Given that the USDA estimates that crops dependent on pollination are worth $10B per year, and the apiculture market is valued at over $11B per year, agriculture and honey beekeeping are the most obvious areas for commercialization.
That being said, many of these are saturated markets with conservative customer bases, and seasonal work. To be successful in this space, companies must find ways to navigate challenging unit economics while also demonstrating consistent benefits to its customers, which is no mean feat.
Silverstrand has yet to make an investment in this space, but we continue to keep an eye out for winning solutions. It would be interesting to see more innovations emerge to address a broader spectrum of issues facing pollinators, including but not limited to invertebrates. The health of our planet depends on it.
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