The gateway to our food supply is pollination and over 70% of our world food crops are pollinated by honeybees. Bees apart from providing us with delicious honey, wax, are also primary pollinators and highly crucial for crop production.
Over the past years the overall population of honeybees has been drastically declining due to habitat loss, use of excess pesticides, diseases and climate change. In this regard bee vectoring technology can be a great boon to farmers in not only preserving bees but also to increase crop production in sustainable manner.
What is Bee vectoring technology?
This technology uses commercially reared bees as 'living drones' to deliver organic fungicides and biopesticides directly onto the flower. A dispenser is kept in the hive that has a patented natural, organic fungicide or other crop control in powder form, so this sticks to the body, legs of the bees as it exits the hive. On reaching the flower the fungicide or biopesticide is shed on the flower while the bees shake it's body to release pollen.
This is a highly targeted method of crop protection, as the compound is directly delivered to the flower.
Advantages over conventional practices:
1) Targeted delivery: The plants in majority are hydrophobic, i.e., water based compounds runoff waxy leaf, such that only 2-5% of the compounds applied by farmers stick onto the crops. Moreover targeted delivery with minimum drift, as water used is very minimum is obtained in BVT. Bees are regular visitors to flowers and thus effectively deliver the compounds along with pollination.
2) Ease in securing organic certification: Biopesticides from beneficial fungi or other microbe is used in BVT which are safe to crops, other pollinators and to bees carrying them as well but specific to crop pests.
3) Increased yield: An increase in pollinator's population subsequently leads to increased fruits and thereby crop yields.
4) Preservation of Bee population: Bees are of indispensable need to farmers and agriculture, this technology aims in promoting well being of bees and provide them a safe environment with added benefits.
Prominent market players of BVT
- Terminix
- Ecolab
- Anticimex
- Bayer AG
- Syngenta AG
- FMC Coorporations
- Bell Laboratories
- Corteva agriscience
- BASF
Challenges of BVT:
- Developing effective and scalable delivery systems
- Greater collaboration with farmers, researchers and beekeepers
- More investment for infrastructure and training
- Lack of protocols and guidelines for determining the product quality
Bee vectoring technology has an estimated market growth of US $34.7 billion in 2032, this projection is by reason of the increased pest outbreak and need of pest control measures for tackling those. Pest control market is a large and developing market in the present times. So, this technology has a great potential to promote ecofriendly, sustainable farming and improve the yields of farmers across the globe.
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