Circular beekeeping technology for pollinator conservation

This week Thomas Slattery spoke with Matthew Elmes and Owen Finnie at Pollenize, using technology and innovation to improve pollinator conservation. In this conversation we discussed the following:

• Pollenize is an innovative pollinator conservation organisation founded by Matthew Elms and Owen Finnie in 2018
• Organisation was originally born out of Elms and Finnie's own allergies to hay fever
• Developed a range of services and products related to pollinator conservation, such as placing beehives in underused city spaces, researching honeybee foraging behaviours, decoding the honeybee waggle dance, and using UV light to photograph moths
• Developed a circular beekeeping method to arm landowners with a gap analysis and prescription seeds mix to improve the area around the hives for bees
• Provide services for landowners such as monthly visits to track improvement over time, as well as providing a seed pharmacy with hundreds of different species available
• Working with the University of Plymouth to develop a biodiversity tracking tool

Pollenize is an innovative pollinator conservation organisation founded by Matthew Elms and Owen Finnie in 2018. The organisation was originally born out of Elms and Finnie's own allergies to hay fever, which they believed they could alleviate by consuming small amounts of local honey. 

Pollenize have since developed a range of services and products related to pollinator conservation, such as placing beehives in underused city spaces, researching honeybee foraging behaviours, decoding the honeybee waggle dance, and using UV light to photograph moths. They have also developed a circular beekeeping method to arm landowners with a gap analysis and prescription seeds mix to improve the area around the hives for bees. 

Pollenize provide services for landowners such as monthly visits to track improvement over time, as well as providing a seed pharmacy with hundreds of different species available. They are also working with the University of Plymouth to develop a biodiversity tracking tool. This tool will enable landowners to put their ecological survey data into the database and track the improvement over time.

Pollenize CIC was founded by born and bred Plymouthians (and best friends) Matthew Elmes and Owen Finnie in 2018.

Pollenize was started as an unassuming initiative to create better access to beekeeping equipment and local honey. Matt and Owen read that local honey was a good way to immunise the symptoms of hay fever, an allergy that both suffer from quite severely! Without being able to find this easily, they took it upon themselves to seek out innovative and accessible ways to keep honey bees in an urban landscape.

After developing a business plan and undertaking all the relevant training in apiculture, Pollenize set up a network of 11 community apiaries (beehive sites) stocked with native honey bees across iconic sites in Plymouth. These sites include landmarks such as the National Marine Aquarium, Royal William Yard and the Devonport Column. This way members of the public could get involved and have a share of the honey crop each year.  It soon became apparent how serious pollinator decline has become and they felt an overwhelming duty to use Pollenize as an effective tool in creating a lasting positive impact in the city.

Four years on since their humble beginnings, Pollenize has been catapulted on an incredible journey fuelled by a sheer fascination with the bees, moths, butterflies and all pollinators, their crucial role for a healthy planet and most importantly what we can do as humans to protect them. As a result, our social enterprise has gained huge momentum, leading them to become a key player in driving environmental research and social change within their city and beyond.

Transcript

0:03

Good morning and welcome to another episode of Seething Sessions. This morning we're speaking with two directors of Pollenize, who are an interesting and innovative pollinator conservation organisation. Hi, guys. So would you mind just introducing yourselves quickly and then maybe telling us a little bit about Pollenize? Thank you. My name is Matthew Elms, I'm one of the directors here at Pollenize and I'm Owen Finnie, I'm a co director at Pollenize as well. Do you want me to go for it sort of familiar territory for both of us, sort of explaining the story of Pollenize. So we founded Pollenize in 2018 and it was broadly due to an allergy that Matt and I suffer from. We both get hay fever quite severely in June and I think that is probably where the sort of idea or the origin of why we decided to pursue the business model. So we tried to put a beehive in an allotment and for a number of reasons we weren't allowed to. So it forced us to look at other sorts of underused spaces in the city and we approached a few organizations that are considered high profile and iconic in Plymouth and asked them very kindly if we could use their spaces like rooftops or community gardens. And that was our first sort of part of the journey of placing beehives on these locations to understand the honeybee and its foraging behaviors and its potential for data collection as well. And then from that, from up to the today, we've developed a range of sort of products and services that are related to pollinator conservation. So just quickly to circle back to something interesting you said there. So this came out of you both having hay fever. Right. So what's the link there? Because for me, obviously, I think pollinators this is the source of hay fever, so you decide to go to what I would think of as a source of the problem, but I've obviously got that wrong. Could you explain that, though? Yeah, so we had heard anecdotally that dosing on small amounts of honey could help alleviate the symptoms of hay fever. And from mine and Matt's, like really practical sort of logical understanding that obviously the honey bees are foraging on a very wide range of flowers, and obviously we're eating and almost immunizing ourselves against that by having small amounts of that exposure to that wide variety of flowers. Whether that's scientifically sound, I guess there's still a lot of study to be understood about that. But that was one of the reasons why Matt and I thought we should set up a hive so we could dose on local honey, essentially. So firstly, just from an N of two with you guys, have you found it as an effective strategy? Yeah, definitely. It was debilitating back in the day. Yeah, I have my honey on my toast every morning and I seem to be a lot better. And I presume importantly, one wouldn't expect to get these benefits from some mass produced Tesco honey. The key here is that it's local fresh honey. Yeah, I think the key drive is localism buying and supporting your local beekeepers honey and then improves traceability of honey. She get these big blended honey from EU and non EU sources and sugar added in. It's best to keep it local. It's such the adulteration of honey is such a massive business. Like it's pretty well studied that anything you get, anything that is sort of cheaply and widely available, has probably been adulters. So yes, the local it's a no brainer. Yeah. A personal passion area of mine is looking at both regenerative products and also short food supply chains and this obviously fits well into that category and I promise we will get more into your business, but it'd be worth the conversation. I'd be interested to know where you source this kind of high quality honey. So that's really interesting. So it'd be good to understand that was the origin story. It would be great to understand a little bit about what you're up to now, what the kind of services and what solutions you're offering. Brilliant. So our interest in bees obviously stemmed from the honey. Then we learnt the role of the honey bee and it's a generalist pollinator, it shares many of the same species, plant species, which it forages its food from as other wild pollinators. So we look after the honeybee returns to the colony every day. It's a really good way of researching bees behavior and using that as a proxy for other insects. So we devised a means of collecting the pollen from the bees, essentially the bees walk down a tube and then we send the tubes away to be analyzed for DNA. So we've been doing that for three years now here in Plymouth. And then we found out about the Honeybees Waggle dance, which is a means of the scout bee telling the other bees where the forage is by doing a dance which gives coordinates to the other bees. So we developed a beehive with the tubes on the front and a camera inside with the associated lighting to be able to film the bees doing their dances. And we've invested in an AI computer and AI capable staff and we're actually decoding the wagon dance so we can find out where the bees are going, what they're eating. And then we've actually pulled in the Met Office API to know the date and time and the weather at that specific location of those coordinates. So we've gone quite in depth there for the study of honeybees. They will go 10 km away in a really stressed time. They ideally want to be going no further than a kilometer away from the hive. So if we know if they're going really far away, it means then that area is stressed and not just for the honeybees, but for other pollinators. So that's why we're learning into the bees. It's probably good to explain that the study of the Waggle dances was done in laboratory conditions. So where our beehives are innovative is that it's capturing it in the field in real time, as compared to where one of the biggest studies is it Sussex or Wessex? Sussex. Sussex uni. Where they were doing it in laboratory conditions with protractors and rulers. And you have to have an observation hive, which means it's observable in the laboratory conditions. So that's where what we've developed is a little bit more innovative than the current ways of studying the Waggle dance. We've moved on to moths using the same camera technology from an agricultural we then applied it to moths. So we have a UV light, which turns on by a computer, and then the moths come in and get photographed and then fly away unharmed in the morning, because there's nearly 900 species of macro moths in the UK and this is a good indicator of biodiversity. So we've also developed that. Coming back to the beekeeping and the regenerative agriculture kind of terms. So if we could see beekeeping as a circular activity where we're listening and learning from the bees what they're feeding on, we can then subtract that from what they could potentially be feeding on. And then we can arm the public and landowners with a gap analysis and a prescription seeds mix to then plant to then improve the area around the hives for the bees through the data that we've learned from the hive. So it's kind of a circular beekeeping method. So we've actually supplied every child, school child in Plymouth with a packet of seeds this year on Earth Day, which was 38,000 seed packets based on our mix from the pollen analysis. So that was a really cool moment. But actually we're doing a further project now with the University of Plymouth, where we have two data gov databases of plant pollinator interaction and insects and their food plants. And we're making a biodiversity tracking tool with an academic called Dr Lauren Ansell. And this tool will, once you put your ecological survey data in there, either insect or plant survey data, it will statistically prescribe the next seed or plant to sow to achieve the maximum benefit in biodiversity. So it's a prescribing tool and what we'll be looking at then is to add this tool as part of a service. So our new service is the Re Polonized Rewilding program, where we'll be doing monthly visits to any landowner or farmer who was just to participate. And then we upload the observed insects and plants through the database and track that improvement over time. And then we can advise on what seeds to plant and if they wish, they can procure the seeds from us. Because we are investing in a seed pharmacy where we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of the different species available to hand and in stock, because we've found, from our own experience, at least some of these seeds are really difficult to obtain. You can't see me through the podcast, but the wall behind us, we've got an eight foot high wall, 9 meters long. We're going to have hundreds and hundreds of jars with all the different seeds behind us. Just to take a second because it's a staggeringly, fascinatingly complex amount of research and technology that you've done there. Just one of the points was talking about the DNA analysis. I'd be interested to hear a bit more about that. So one of our members is Nature Metrics, who do DNA analysis on soil samples and water samples to map biodiversity of DNA. Is the analysis that you're doing something similar to that? So we have an analytics partner called Beebytes Analytics and they're based in the Roslin Innovation Center in Edinburgh and they take care of this service for us. And it's a process called metabarcoding. Are you looking for plant species DNA? Yes, we have done whole genome bee genomics as well, where we sent Bees off to the team and then they worked out the lineage, but they can also find out if there's any pathogens in the bees guts. So they're the experts on that. We're working with them. I guess probably important to point out that through the pollen data, what we're hoping to do is to leverage that data with someone like a statutory body where we can help improve their planting strategy. As Matt was saying that there's a preferential foraging radius for honeybees, and by doing that gap analysis, we could certainly sort of suggest to say that if they are going quite far away, that the planting could be improved nearby or within the area. So, yeah, there's the real world application of partnering with a statutory body to improve that opportunity for them. My assumption is that the potential clients for this are landowners, property developers, that sort of thing. Are you looking to offer kind of full service? Everything from installing beehives to monitoring? That's the sort of the beauty of the Rewilding program is that you can take as much or as little as you want from what we offer, but the biodiversity tracking tool is a basic sort of survey of your land. Understand the value, but if you want to add more data sets or more opportunities to look at the biodiversity value, we can put a beehive in there, we can put a mothbox in there, we can supply seeds. We've got a library of services which we can take advantage of. It's using the bees and the moths as a biosensor. Essentially, we're asking them to do the hard work. They're already out there doing these services to the environment, so we're just tapping into that behavior that already exists. It's great. One of the reasons I love this is it's not a bad thing, but particularly in the sort of agricultural regenerative movement, there's a bit of a carbon myopia at the moment. And part of that is because it's comparatively. It's not easy to measure. It's comparatively easier to measure. But there's a growing body of evidence that biodiversity is a much stronger indicator of ecosystem health, soil health, et cetera. And so any efforts like this to both help build biodiversity or pollinator at least, and measure that, well, it's incredibly exciting and has the potential. I mean, I think all landowners now would like to see an increased biodiversity, understand how they're improving that and how better to improve it. But we have the potential at some point down the line, fingers crossed with technologies like this, to have biodiversity credits in the way that we're starting to see the emergence of carbon credits. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of bits of studies out there suggesting that wildflower, rich meadows can sequester carbon really in a really well, obviously, no, planting trees is obviously the long term strategy, but in terms of a short term one, I think wildflower meadows can be as effective. But yeah, the biodiversity net gain stuff is 2023, isn't it, the legislation. So next year, biodiversity net gains going to be a big driver in the area, and also the ELMS as well. It's definitely got to be a mixed strategy. I mean, it's interesting you mentioned sort of a forestry, but I think any successful transition towards kind of an overall agroecological system is going to be a mixture of that and wildfire meadows and better pasture and better Arable techniques. There is no silver bullet to this. And I think we need all of these things. Yeah, definitely. So what are the next big steps? What exciting things are kind of on the horizon? And we go to some of that. Yeah. So we're working on a weekly basis. We're meeting up with Lauren at the University of Plymouth. We're making the front end of this biodiversity tracking tool. It's looking really good. We're almost making Pokemon cards for each of the seed species with all the stats, Top Trumps. And then we have this the map. But the rewilding map we have on our website. Once a plant scanned in through the eye naturalist app, a pixel image version of that plant will then propagate the map so we'll be able to geofence some fields or a park or a university campus. And then almost like gamifying the experience. So we're going to be encouraging kids to play, adults to play, and also we'll be conducting surveys ourselves. So, yeah, we're having a lot of fun, to be honest. And we're going to be building this seed pharmacy, and we're going to be promoting it in the new year with the construction sector. We're going to continue working with Agri-EPI Center to try and get some of the satellite farms involved in what we're doing. We're looking forward to next year. We've a small project next year, which was a campaign to bring awareness to pesticide use in the urban environment. I know it's slightly off topic because we're talking about the agricultural sector. Not at all. But we just feel like for our work around pollinator conservation, we need to make the leap from people that don't want to see insect or pollination insects die, but just to understand that pesticides have a part to play in that decline as well. So we're quite keen to see that project be delivered next year because we feel like the public will be able to make a more informed decision about how they leverage that knowledge against what a statutory body should or could be doing to provide alternatives as well. Yeah, it's really interesting. There's clearly a big step change happening in this area. I mean, I live in London and I'm just fascinated to see that my local council, Hammersmith and Fulham, have been signposting rewilding in all of the local parks here, and they have a sort of a whole educational piece that links to that. And it's really encouraging to hear that you're also looking at the education, particularly with children, because I'm a firm believer that change in this area is we cannot expect it to come entirely from policy. It needs to be grassroots thing. And there is currently an almost critical disconnection between two things. One, the people who grow food and the people who eat food. And there's also a massive critical disconnect between urban and rural environments. And this kind of work that you're doing, particularly with children as well, it's just so vital to make people understand why these things are important, what the knock on effects are, how they can help, etc, etc. So that's really wonderful that you're doing that as well. Well, we rely on farmers at least three times a day, don't we? That's why we kind of developed the map, because I think with a lot of environmental initiatives and behaviors at home, sometimes you can't.