The Future of Food: Saving the Bees with Blockchain

Everybody who eats food needs bees, and yet they're dying like never before. We're living in a moment when we finally have access to technologies such as blockchain and machine learning to inform and take corrective action, but when will we use them?

We scientists have known for over a decade that bees are rapidly dying off in industrialized countries. There’s no solution in the pipeline. Using our own beehive software over the past 11 years, we have compiled one of the largest data libraries in the world on bee health.

We are actively charting the nodes of a vast and dispersed network of beehives to create groups of data - blocks - for an interconnected system. Each data beehive can download all blocks about the health status of all beehives, setting up an honest reporting system - called a blockchain - where everyone will know where in the world bees are thriving, and why - for the first time in history.

This is how blockchain technology will save the bees - by creating an honest and accessible reporting system. And adding a machine learning component, the blockchain can trigger sick beehives to heal themselves. It’s up to us to embrace these ideas now, to leverage blockchain and machine learning to save the bees once and for all.