Description:
Implement connected beehives in cities to produce high quality food through short distribution channels and to contribute to a better management of the urban green spaces, leveraging:
● Open data about the urban vegetation
● Data and information collected by the connected beehives the new business model of urban beekeeping
Challenges:
Leverage technology to urbanize wild life (bees) and rural activities (beekeeping) in urban farming processes needs to address three main challenges:
● Neighbourhood support (avoid swarming, communication)
● Accessibility and logistics optimization (sustainable business model) demonstrate the positive impact on the quality of life (local food & green fields)
Major Requirements:
The pilot projects might be locally supported by the local government and must involve three main stakeholders: the “host” and the inhabitants in the neighbourhood, the local urban beekeeping community, the solution provider (hostabee.com).
The requirements are:
● Identify test bed location (roofs, green fields, urban parks…)
● Publish open data about the vegetation in the test bed area
● Define a local communication plan and objective about urban farming and impact on urban green environment
● Involve urban (or rural) beekeepers
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
● Increase most important bee plants in the area by 20% (namely thanks to pollination)
● Reduce the number of required visit to the urban beehives by 25% (namely thanks to remote control of the beehives)
● Eliminate the use of pesticides following strong communication about the impact especially linked to bees preservation
Measurement Methods:
● Botany inventory of the area before and after experience
● Beekeepers feedback
● Evaluation of the pesticides use before and after experience
Standards/Interoperability:
This project will leverage on FIWARE (fiware.org), a public, royalty-free and open source platform that eases the development of Smart Applications in multiple vertical sectors. Besides being one of the reference platforms for GCTC 2016, FIWARE is contributing to the International Technical Working Group on IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework launched by NIST. FIWARE brings the NGSI standard API which represents a pivot point for Interoperability and Portability of smart city applications and services.
Replicability, Scalability, and Sustainability:
Such FIWARE NGSI API is one of the pillars of the Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative (oascities.org), a driven-by-implementation initiative that works to address the needs from the cities avoiding vendor lock-in, comparability to benchmark performance, and easy sharing of best practices. There are currently 89 cities from 19 countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific who have officially joined this initiative, including Saint-Quentin city.
Project Impacts:
From beekeepers point of view, this principle disrupts with the traditional business model because the beekeeper’s revenue depends more on the quality and quantity of services instead of production. Thanks to this new approach, an important part of urban beekeeping jobs will be opened to specialized technicians. For environment and quality of life, green fields and urban parks may evolve as more “natural areas”, with a better understanding of the natural processes by the city inhabitants.
Demonstration:
Phase I Pilot/Demonstration June 2016:
The city of Saint-Quentin will host between 4 and 12 connected beehives. The involved beekeepers will check the liability of the predictive information provided by the technology. 6 local events will be organized to present the experimentation to the inhabitants (including the harvest of the honey) with a focus on educational purposes towards schools about the bees, the IoT and the urban green fields.
The city services in charge of the green areas will experiment and follow new bee plants and the elimination of pesticides use on predefined areas.
Phase II Deployment June 2017:
Scale to 5 to 10 cities in the world
Team Information: Team Lead:
Vincent Demortier, Hostabee ([email protected])
