FUTURISTIC BEEHIVES FOR A SMART METROPOLIS

Honeybees are important pollinators and support various important ecosystems with their ecological services. Rapid anthropogenic changes cause disruptive disturbances of their habitats which are currently endangering honeybee colonies around the world and incurring an immense financial toll. We aim to help the bees in coping with these adverse environmental factors by establishing technologies in and around a futuristic honeybee colony that allow the colony to perform well in very challenging environments, for example within high-precision farming, including monocultural agriculture involving pesticide, within smart cities of the future and within highly industrialized areas. We aim to make technologies available to honeybees that are naturally inaccessible for them (internet, databases, satellite data, robots...) and to feed information collected by bees through these channels back to humans and other hives. This collection of hives, technologies and humans is called HIVEOPOLIS in our concept. HIVEOPOLIS technology will be integrated in a way that it provides a synergistic added value to the colony, to its owner and to society in general. It will be sustainable from the ecological point of view and also from the intellectual point of view (open software, open hardware, open data, citizen scientists). Our society will benefit from the pollination services and other bee-derived services and products, in a more stable and controllable way, even in harsher ecological conditions of the future. The emphasis on community-forming activities of the project will bring together makers, beekeepers, farmers, programmers, environmentalists, educators and many other stakeholders. Ultimately, HIVEOPOLIS will bring honeybee societies into a new future and will integrate them into the hearts of our own future smart cities.