[Saar Safra — 0:00]

We're losing 45% of all bee colonies every single year, year over year. On the planet. Today we have 36% of the bee stock we had 50 years ago. That's it. Once that's gone, it's gone. Because bees pollinate 75% of all our fruit and vegetables all around the world, we would not be able to feed 8 billion people without bee pollination. We set out on a very audacious mission of saving the bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:25]

All right, and so what'd you build?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:27]

Today we have the best beekeeper on the planet. Supersedes any other human beekeeper that you can imagine.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:32]

It's just not human.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:33]

It's not human. Even if you put a thousand people around a million bees, we would not be able to tell every single bee in every single colony what's going on. The model does in milliseconds.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:43]

There's a lot of talk today about AI replacing people's jobs. This clearly replaces the beekeeper. What does the average beekeeper say about the BeeHome? There was a joke going on in the back here about honey laundering. What percentage of the honey in the United States is sold after it was honey laundered?  Welcome back to another episode of Invested. I am thrilled to be here today with my old friend. Can we say that? Saar Safra, who is the founder and CEO of Beewise. We'll start with how long do we know each other?

‍

[Saar Safra — 1:31]

I met you first in 1996, so I can't do the math. I'm too old for it. But 30 years.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

It's incredible since you're only 40 years old, you were 10 when you pitched your first company. What company was that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 1:35]

I can say the same thing about you.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 1:37]

What company was that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 1:38]

It was a company called back then called Veri. We did P2P payments. P2P payments in 1996.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Before X.com and PayPal.

‍

[Saar Safra — 1:48]

Before X.com and PayPal.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

There are actually two P2P payments companies in Israel at the time. Back then, one was a bunch of pilots and then there was yours.

‍

[Saar Safra — 1:56]

That's right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 1:57]

And after that you sold the company to Microsoft and spent how many years in Seattle?

‍

[Saar Safra — 2:07]

Definitely overstayed my welcome. Fifteen years.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 2:09]

Fifteen years in Seattle, Redmond, Washington. Doing exactly what at Microsoft?

‍

[Saar Safra — 2:14]

I worked there. At Microsoft, actually I worked for just a couple of years – a day after my earnout. So not. That wasn't a long stint. And then I left and found another startup.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 2:25]

In the ad tech business.

‍

[Saar Safra — 2:27]

No, that was the first one. The second one was in the real estate business. We did resident portals for large multifamily apartment complexes. So if you lived in an apartment complex, you could pay rent online, you can meet your neighbors, you can kind of join the book club or the, you know, the Biking Club. And that was our software back in the heydays of SaaS.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 2:51]

All this is a promo to say that you did P2P payments, ad tech software for real estate, and now bees. And so explain the career transition to bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 3:06]

Actually, it makes sense, right? Ad tech, prop tech, you know, P2P payments and then bees. That's just.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Natural progression.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Natural continuation. No, but, you know, but there is, there is a good point there to be made. And, you know, I'll take 30 seconds to just talk about that. As you grow older, right, I'm around 50.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

I'm around 50.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

It's not 55. Just, just turn, turn the corner. So still not used to saying it. No, but, but point being is that as you grow older, there's a, I feel on myself, I become more dogmatic and there's a more strict criteria of how I want to apply myself, you know, on this planet. Right. So when I had this kind of in between startups transition phase, I took a year and I decided to focus not on bees per se, but on something that had real impact in the real world. In Israel.

‍

[Saar Safra — 4:04]

That was kind of part of my very almost strict criteria. It had to be a billion dollar business, it had to be deep technology. These are two things that I always kind of focus on. And it had to be a vertical. So when you add all these criteria, it leaves you very few spaces that you can actually operate in. Bees, or actually pollination, that would be the right kind of term, is one of those very laggards industries that are still fully manual. No technology, no industrial revolution has been here. Forget about AI, forget about robotics. So it was beautiful. It was like a shining ball that was like, oh, I have to do this because everything points me in this direction.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 4:50]

I mean, I have to use the phrase, how'd you get the bug about bees?

‍

[Saar Safra — 4:53]

Yeah, every beekeeper you meet in your life, if you ask them, why are they in the bees business, they'll tell you, we didn't find the bees, the bees found us. And my story kind of applies in the same way. I moved to Israel and in that year I kind of helped a few startups just establish, more on the product side, that's kind of my forte, pro bono, just, just to get to know the ecosystem. After being away for 15 years, you're basically the only person I knew in the country beyond my family. One of these guys was a beekeeper. And he came and he said, hey, Saar, I have an idea. I'm a beekeeper. I don't even know what. I don't know what a product manager is. I told him, you need product. He said, I don't know what that is, but. But he basically said, I need help building this company. And his name is Eliyah. He's my co-founder, till this day, the smartest human being I've ever met. And I'm very fortunate to be part of his journey. And I started to help him for three months. That was kind of my window. You get three months for free. And then I move on. And we built, you know, we started there and then I fell in love with the bees. There's more to that story, but that's kind of how they found me, through Eliyah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:05]

Did you know any beekeepers before you met Eliyah?

‍

[Saar Safra — 6:08]

I did not.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:09]

Okay, so you went through your life of almost 50 years and never met a beekeeper. And one guy walked in and said, hey, I need some help. And you said, sure, I'd love to help you with the bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 6:17]

He gave me a two hour pitch. But, yeah, I mean, the thing is that, you know, there's a real need and there's a real problem in our food supply industry. And bees are integral. They're in the heart of that. Which we can talk about.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:33]

Yeah. So let's take a step back. So bees have been around since the beginning of time. We think, we don't know.

‍

[Saar Safra — 6:37]

150 million years.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:40]

Okay. And they've been pollinating the world and everything seems to be going just fine. And then all of a sudden, we needed beekeepers at some point in time.

‍

[Saar Safra — 6:51]

Everything seemed to be working fine. And then we came along.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:55]

No, wait, wait, wait. Before we get to you.

‍

[Saar Safra — 6:56]

Not us, we humans.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 6:59]

We humans. The royal we.

‍

[Saar Safra — 7:02]

Yeah, the general we. I wish it was really royal, you know, but here's the thing, right? Bees are nature's way to pollinate itself. The thing is that we tend to think of bees as a separate entity from trees or nature. They're not we just humans. We see things as disparate and separate. But trees lure bees in with nectar. Bees are addicted to carbs, like we are like any living organism. They like the sugar. So they're being pulled and attracted by flowers that have nectar, right? So they come in and the length of their tongue is the depth of the nectar in the flower. So they go in and they kind of swoop the nectar. But as they go in, the pollen is at the top of the flower. So the pollen, the bee is negatively charged and a flower is positively charged. So there's electrostatic attraction between two. So the pollen sticks to the bee's hair. And when the bee moves from one flower to the other to collect nectar, that's how they pollinate. So essentially, bees are the tool for trees to pollinate themselves, because trees are static. They can't move pollen from one to the other. Right? So when you look at all these things, you basically see how a bee is a continuation of a flower, of a branch, of a tree, of nature. It's pretty crazy. And so my point is that bees were here all along. We know they've been here for over 150 million years. I'll talk about that in a minute., how we know this. And then as humans came along, we started to kind of harvest bees for our own needs. When we started kind of moving from hunter gatherers to kind of more forming agriculture. And we use the bees in the way that they're used to being used. They pollinate, they do that, and we collect the honey. Bees will produce as much honey as there is forage, right? As long as there's forage, they'll produce honey, way more than they need. Honey is the food of bees. They collect honey during the summer, so they have food during the winter. It's their own food. They produce their own honey for themselves. But they will overproduce, which is what we can take for ourselves. And that's what humans have been doing for millennia, right? But about 50 years ago, the world changed. We know this today. It's not only climate change, it's also the pesticides we started to use to really kind of grow commercial grade agriculture and produce. It's the monoculture that came in. Today you have 2 million acres of almond in California, millions of acres of avocado in the same place, which means the bees have only one source of food. Bees only eat nectar, which is their carbs, and pollen, which is the protein. If the flowers don't bloom and there's avocados instead, that doesn't help the bees. There's no food source. You need flowers. So if you have a million acres of avocado that bloom only in April, that's it. It's a desert for bees. For us, it would look wonderful, a lot of green. For the bees, it's desert 11 months throughout the year. The monoculture and all these practices essentially made it really hard on the bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 10:12]

Also, when you prune the flowers off the trees, then to get bigger fruit, which is commonly done in modern agriculture, that's bad for the bees too?

‍

[Saar Safra — 10:20]

No, that happens. It's a good point. It depends when you do it. But you're right. If done right, it's after that the flowers have produced the pollen that they need to pollinate. It's when they become fruit set. And you're right, that's what is being done to get better quality of fruit eventually.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 10:39]

So before we get into the modern bee problem. So producing, pollination is a byproduct of the bee simply feeding itself. And that's how trees reproduce and we create fruits and more trees and all that other goodness. So when did the first beekeeper come into being.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 11:03]

The bees were fine for a long time. They didn't need babysitters or keepers or anything like that.

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:07]

But what happened is because they produce honey, and honey is something we can talk about forever, it's a high quality, very healthy product. Right? You know, you apply honey on wounds. Cancer patients eat honey because it's the only thing they can eat. Honey has special qualities. Honey is basically flower nectar. And we know that most of the medicine in the world is, beyond the chemical stuff, is from nature. Honey is the same way.

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:35]

And it depends which flower you take it from.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 11:37]

Do you eat a lot of honey?

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:38]

I do.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 11:39]

You eat it raw?

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:40]

Of course.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 11:42]

How many spoons a day?

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:44]

If I had to average, it will be very, very costly. So I prefer not to talk about, you know, that expense. But we eat a lot of honey. It's very, very healthy.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 11:52]

You're very skinny, though, so that sugar doesn't make you fat.

‍

[Saar Safra — 11:55]

I feel like at my age, I'm starting to kind of grow a little bit. But honey, honey is a carb, so you will grow fat from it. But it's very healthy. It's extremely healthy. It doesn't have any shelf life. You can keep honey for thousands of years.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:10]

Thousands of years?

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:11]

They found honey in the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, and they tasted it. They didn't like the taste, but it was perfectly edible.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:19]

They didn't like the taste, but it was perfectly edible.

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:21]

Yeah. The flora, you know, the taste of the honey is based on the flower.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:25]

Flower kind of flour.

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:26]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:26]

Like avocado honey is different than.

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:27]

That's right. Lavender honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:30]

Right, etc.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:31]

Yeah, yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:33]

I'm personally partial to avocado honey for what it's worth.

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:36]

It's not. It's not the greatest honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:38]

What's the best honey?

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:40]

Again, I think it's a well known fact. Manuka is the best honey in the world today. It's both the most healthy and the most delicious honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 12:49]

Explain to our audience what manuka is.

‍

[Saar Safra — 12:51]

Manuka is a type of flower that grows in very specific places on the planet. On mountaintops. It's like those movies that you see. There is a special flower that somebody, you know, looks searches their whole life. That's those.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:08]

What are those places that you can find Manuka?

‍

[Saar Safra — 13:10]

You know, New Zealand and Australia in very specific areas there, in high mountains, in a specific climate. And they actually fly in hives using choppers so the bees can harvest the manuka and they take the hives out. So it's a very expensive honey. Some Manuka honey is sold at a million dollars a kilo.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:31]

Have you tasted any?

‍

[Saar Safra — 13:33]

Not that expensive, but absolutely. Manuka. Yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:35]

You can buy it and you taste the difference.

‍

[Saar Safra — 13:37]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:37]

It's really that good?

‍

[Saar Safra — 13:38]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:40]

How come you didn't buy me any? Million dollars of what? For the Manuka honey.

‍

[Saar Safra — 13:45]

For a kilo of honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Kilo.  And people buy that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

There are people who can afford that.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 13:52]

I'm sure people can afford it. The question is whether people actually spend a million dollars on a kilo of honey.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

They do. And what's the medicinal properties of it?

‍

[Saar Safra — 14:00]

Honey has, you know, many, many areas that it affects our health. First of all, in open wounds, you can.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 14:09]

I know you mentioned that, but specifically Manuka honey you said was more healthy. What makes it more healthy?

‍

[Saar Safra — 14:14]

I think it's. Again, I'm not an expert in the manuka field, but antioxidents and it repress. It's mostly against cancer. Being used against cancer.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 14:25]

Okay. So that's a premium cancer treatment. The chemicals for chemo, I guess, are cheaper than the Manuka honey at that point.

‍

[Saar Safra — 14:32]

A, yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 14:33]

Yeah.

‍

[Saar Safra — 14:34]

And B, you know, it's not. It doesn't solve issues, but it definitely helps.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 14:37]

Got it. I want to go back to the beekeepers. So when did beekeepers first arrive in.

‍

[Saar Safra — 14:41]

So because honey is such a high quality, kind of almost kind of free sugar alternative from way back when, many, many thousands of years ago, there's. We see evidence that bees were grown domestically as we started farming, both for their pollination capabilities and for the honey. Right. So it's kind of a. It's a, you know, double whammy. If you grow bees as a farmer and when people started farming, really, I mean, tens of thousands of years ago, there's evidence that they used bees for pollination and for the honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 15:19]

And that they collected them.

‍

[Saar Safra — 15:21]

Yeah. And they grew them in plastic, or not plastic, in, like, baskets.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 15:25]

In wicker baskets?

‍

[Saar Safra — 15:27]

Yeah, you know, like straw baskets.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 15:28]

Straw baskets, yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 15:29]

They grew the honey, the bees, the colonies.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 15:32]

What does it mean to grow a bee?

‍

[Saar Safra — 15:34]

So. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, because bees go out and forage in the field. You can't really fence it. It's not like cattle that you can fence it. It's still livestock, but you can't fence it. So you have to create an environment for the bees to come back home after they forage in the field. And usually you do that by giving the queen a good safe place to live and lay her eggs. And if that works well, then the bees come back to their queen. The bees are submissive creatures. So once it, you know, after 24 hours of the queen, it becomes submissive to that queen. That's based on pheromones. And so the bee will go out and forage and come back to her queen. If her home is not safe or not good enough for them to grow their colony, they will leave. You will lose them. That's what's called, that's what's called the swarm. It will swarm away and leave their home.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 16:33]

And what makes a home safe for a queen bee?

‍

[Saar Safra — 16:37]

So in nature, bees find a good home in a trunk of a tree. It's. It's kind of not too humid, closed area with one entrance that they go in and out where they can grow their combs. Right. The frames. And that's where they lay their eggs, store the nectar, store the honey, store the pollen in those kind of honeycombs that we're used to seeing.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 17:05]

Like at nice hotels, they put up there for you to kind of scoop the honey out.

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:08]

Exactly.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 17:09]

That's where most people have seen them. I don't think they've seen them in nature.

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:12]

Yeah, exactly.

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:12]

Right.

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:13]

We don't see them in nature as much, but yeah, I mean, if. Even today, if bees swarm away, they will swarm to a trunk of a tree.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 17:20]

Interesting. But again, what makes the. That straw basket or a wood box generally painted white, a safe home for a queen bee?

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:31]

It's painted white against the heat of the sun.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 17:33]

Yeah.

‍

[Saar Safra — 17:34]

So these are the considerations. Right. You give the bees an enclosed area with an entrance, and you give it, you try it. You know, when we, when this box was founded. It's called the Langstroth Hive. It was founded in 1850.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

1850, the white boxes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah by Lorenzo Langstroth. And he patented them, by the way. And today, in 2026, that's the standard. That's the norm all around the world, from China to the US and everything in between.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

That's unbelievable. It's 170 years, 175 years, a guy invented a wood box and it's still the standard for cultivating bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

The wood box worked really great in 1850 because it was a good enough sanctuary for bees. They found it good and comfortable. And it was great for us humans to harvest the honey because it has these frames you can just pull out and just collect the honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

How many frames in a wood box?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Today, there's ten. And it's pretty amazing. That's what he invented in 1850 and because he was smart enough to patent it for the first 15 years, it caught on and it stayed and it just shows you kind of how inertia works. It worked great. On the planet there were 1 billion people. We didn't need as much pollination and not much honey was being consumed. But as demand grew, the technology didn't keep up and we're still using these boxes today to feed 8 billion people 75% of all the fruit and vegetables that they eat are pollinated by bees in these wooden boxes that are being transfered and hauled around.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

So tell everybody about that. Before we get on to what Beewise does, this is an important background. Today, if i need to pollinate 2 million acres of almonds in california or a million acres of avocado, how do i get enough bees there to pollinate it?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

So today, fast forward to 2026, pollination and beeking is a commercial grade buisiness. Meaning that you have commercial beekeeprers that grow thousands and tens of thousands of bee colonies in those boxes, in the beehives, and they move then around between pollination opportunities throughout the year. Nature has made it so there is not much competition between competing crops so you have crops from January all the way to November and you have a few crops every month. So what beekeepers do is they bring the bees in and they place them in the field and the bees do their thing. They go in and out and they forage int he field and they pollinate and then after about a month to a month and a half, they move the hives to the next crop and the next crop and the next crop.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

How do they move these hives?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

On trucks. They haul them around. 18 wheelers.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

18 wheeler trucks, pack the bees top to bottom.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah put them four or five stories high.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

How many bees are on those trucks?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Ballpark four hundred colonies. Each colony is about 50 thousand bees. It's a very powerful

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

If my math is right, you'll tell me in a second. You said four hundred boxes, each one with fifty thousand bees in them. Each of the boxes with fifty thousand bees in them. So we're at.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

200 million.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

200 million bees on a flatbed truck?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Give or take.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Okay and nobody gets bit by this?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah the beekeepers get stung.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

The drivers of the trucks?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

They wear suits.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

They wear suits.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah, everybody is suited up in that scenario. Usually we move bees during the night when they are asleep. bees are asleep, they don't go out at night.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Really?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah, they like eight hours of sleep. They're very - there's a lot of similarities to us if you think about it.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

What happens when a bee doesn't get eight hours of sleep?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Its antsy.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

You've seen this? Like, you know this?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah, bees are angry. They have moods.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

And then what do they do?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

They're more prone to sting When you're next to a colony and its a little bit antsy, you'll feel it. They'll bump into you, into your suit. They'll buzz around you. They'll swarm around you Suddenly you'll see a cloud of bees around your head even if you're suited up and geared up. And if they're calm, you will feel it. You'll put your hand and they'll walk over you calmly. You can actually sense the mood of the colony.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Can a beekeeper feed them Advil PM and put them back to sleep? Does that work?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

You know, bees do get medicine as well, right?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

That feels dangerous to me.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Well, bees have viruses like we do.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

And what's their medicine?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

They have stomach viruses. They have stomach flu. Deformed wings. They have a lot of different - Nosema.They get like droplets of

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

You give them?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah we give them medicine.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Interesting, we'll come to you in a second. So you're transporting flatbed trucks to the almond growers in California or the

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Then you move up to Oregon and Washington for apple, peach, canola. Then you move inland for more of the canola, sunflower and sunflower seeds and so on. And then they move all the way to the east coast to pollinate the different type of berries. Blackberries, blueberries, and so on. And then even some go all the way down to Florida where for the citrus pollination.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

What do you mean some of them have to go to Florida? How you gonna get oranges if you don't get the bees there?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

You know, pollination is not a binary thing. You would some yield without bees necessarily.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Right, just not as much.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Not as much, yeah. For almonds, for example, you'll get 10% of your yield without bees. For avocado.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

10%?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

10%. For coffee, you get 50% without bees. So it's a significant uptick in yield. And when you think about commercial, everything is about the bottom line and numbers, right?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

When I truck in 400 million bees, what does that cost the almond farmer?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

So the way the almond farmer pays is they pay per hive.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Per hive, per box?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Per box, yeah. So they would bring in, lets say if youre a typical almond farmer, you bring it lets call it 5,000 hives and you would pay $200 per hive.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Per hive.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

For that pollination event. If you have an avocado field and you need another pollination, down the road, you'll pay another whatever that would be - another 100, $150 for that avocado. Again, for every pollination.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Oh it's cheaper depending on - almonds are more expensive to pollinate than avocados?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

It's a matter of competing crops. During February and March, you have the most competing crops so.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Interesting.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

So those crops garner the highest cost per hive. As you go throughout the year, it becomes cheaper.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

So it's seasonal?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

It is seasonal.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

There's seasonal pricing for bees. Are there different parts of the year where the bees do a better job pollinating than others?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

No.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

No. Workhorses.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah, bees are amazing. They will pollinate 1,000 flowers a day. They will fly for 12 hours. They wil produce, you know, a teaspoon of honey throughout their lifetime and they costs 1/1000th of a cent. One US cent divided by 1,000. That's the cost of a bee. So think about how effective.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Why is my honey so damn expensive then?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Because I guess you buy good quality honey right?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

We'll come back to that in a second. We have to come back to honey afterward. Okay now, having done this entire introduction to the world of bees that we're in, tell everybody what Beewise does.

‍

[Saar Safra — 25:04]

We set out on a very audacious mission of saving the bees in order to secure global food supplies. Because bees pollinate 75% of all our fruit and vegetables all around the world. Right. And we really like our produce. We like fresh produce in every street corner, anywhere you go from China, the US, the bees are essential. They're an essential input into global farming. Not many people know this. If I would tell you you need irrigation for produce, you would get that, and you would understand it's infrastructural, and it's a critical input. The same with pollination. We would not be able to feed 8 billion people with all the produce and coffee that we drink without bee pollination. So they're a critical input into global farming. On the other hand, they're collapsing today. We're losing a lot of our bee colonies. The global average rate is 45%. We're losing 45% of all bee colonies every single year, year over year.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 26:04]

Say that again. So if we have a million bee colonies now, we obviously have more than that. Let's say we have a million bee colonies right now. At the end of 2026, there will be 550,000.

‍

[Saar Safra — 26:17]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 26:18]

And then at the end of 2027, there will be something like 300,000.

‍

[Saar Safra — 26:23]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 26:24]

And that means that very fast. If that's been going on, how long has that been going on for?

‍

[Saar Safra — 26:29]

That hasn't been going on for too long. In the last 50 years, we started to see decline in bee colonies. But in the last five years, let's call it seven, eight years, it started to grow dramatically.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 26:42]

The rate of destruction, of collapse, is growing. But if that's true that it's been shrinking at 45% for the last eight years, we should be at 90% reduction roughly, of bee colonies over the last eight, nine years. Is that right?

‍

[Saar Safra — 26:56]

So today the 45% is relatively recent. When we founded the company back in 2018, it was closer to 30%, which was alarming to us.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:07]

So there's still an accelerating decline of bee colonies around the world?

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:10]

Year over year. Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:11]

What's happening to them?

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:13]

By the way, last year in the U.S. the formal number released by the USDA was 62%.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:18]

62% of bee colonies collapsed.

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:20]

The U.S. lost 62% of its bee stock in that single year.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:24]

In 2025.

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:25]

In 2025. And so what happens is there's area in the. There's areas on the planet that don't lose as much, like 10, 15, 20%. So we buy bees from them. Basically, we're hauling bees all around the world.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:36]

You buy bees from them or people buy bees from them?

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:39]

Everybody. Beekerpers.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:39]

Everybody buys. Which are the best places for bee production right now?

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:42]

Australia and New Zealand were the best because they had the least issues with bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:48]

Those manuka flowers again.

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:50]

Well, yeah. But also other things that Australia did really well.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Such as?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

It's an island so it's easier to control everything that's going on, everything that's coming in.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 27:57]

So they didn't do anything well, other than being sent to a.

‍

[Saar Safra — 27:59]

When was the last time that you traveled to Australia?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:01]

Never in my life. I've never been.

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:03]

So if you travel to Australia, a funny thing happens on the plane. You get sprayed on the plane on the way there. They basically, they basically spray you up and clean you up on the planes that are coming into Australia to make sure you're not bringing any pathogens.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:18]

Interesting.

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:19]

So Australia is really very sensitive to everything that's coming in and out. This is why it was able to kind of maintain a high quality of bee economy.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:29]

Where else are bees flourishing?

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:31]

Other areas that are less industrial.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:34]

Okay. Such as?

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:35]

Not Israel, but you know, other, other places. Africa. There's some good places where you can get good bees. They're just a little bit different. In Africa, the bee.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:44]

What makes the bees different in Africa?

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:45]

Africanized bees are a little bit more aggressive. Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 28:50]

Aggressive on what?

‍

[Saar Safra — 28:52]

Aggressive towards people. So they're the same bee, it's called the honeybee, but. But they're a little bit more aggressive. But not, not something that would prevent us from growing bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 29:03]

Right, but just put on a thicker suit.

‍

[Saar Safra — 29:05]

That's right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 29:06]

Okay.

‍

[Saar Safra — 29:06]

You just have to be more sensitive.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 29:08]

So bee colonies are collapsing around the world. United States 62% in the last, in 2025. Things are better in Australia because they spray you with all sorts of things on the airplanes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 29:19]

That's just an example.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 29:20]

And in Africa things are better also, but it's more dangerous because. And so into this world of a 175-year-old bee box and beekeepers steps Beewise. And so what are you doing now?

‍

[Saar Safra — 29:35]

What we realized is that the actual beehive is the bottleneck. Because in order to treat bees for all the modern stressors we've exposed them to pesticides, pests, disease that didn't used to be, monoculture, lack of forage, lack of biodiversity. All those things have a very negative impact on bees in the form of colony collapse. And we realized that the real problem was the box, the hive, because the hive doesn't allow you to take any proactive action in real time in the field. And so you need beekeepers to haul themselves and travel to the fields every single day. Open every box, look inside, identify what's going on. So you need a level of expertise, and then apply a certain treatment. It could be things like feeding the bees because there's only avocados and there's no more flowers right now. It could be giving them water, medicine. Again, preventing pesticides from going in, which is not something we can do in real time. But point being is that it all depended on people getting to the right place in the right time, which is practically impossible.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 30:45]

So let me just cut you off one second because this is important. You know, I have a farm, so I. We have beehives. So beehives don't sit centrally if you've ever seen them, they're actually spread around fields. That's right, because they have to have each have their own foraging areas with which to go. And so the beekeeper needs to walk around or run around and sometimes drive around to all these places and find each individual beehive and open it up and look inside and see what's going on. He pulls out the rack, the frame from there. And also, because these beehives are in the field, when they spray pesticides on the field, a byproduct of that is it gets into the beehives.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

And it kills the bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

.And it kills the bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 31:21]

The ratio between a commercial beekeeper and hives is one to a thousand.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 31:26]

One beekeeper for a thousand hives.

‍

[Saar Safra — 31:28]

Which means the frequency of visitors for every hive is once a month.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 31:31]

Okay, a lot can happen in a month to a bee.

‍

[Saar Safra — 31:34]

That's right. And the best beekeepers are able to do it once every three weeks. But the problem is, beekeepers work always in arrears. They get there and they realize, I lost a colony. This colony is famished. This colony is dead out of disease, and that's the only way they operate. All they can do is just replace the colony with a new one. Buy colonies and replace them. And that's why we're seeing high colony collapse rates. And when we realized this early on in the company, there were a lot of solutions for bees. There were a lot of startups out there and technologies to try and help bees. But we felt like there were more products looking for a problem than really solutions to the main problem. The main problem was you got to get rid of that hive and you got to be able to treat in real time in the field. That's a big hairy problem to solve. It's expensive, it's hard. Bees, it's a biological model. There's many of them. You need to identify, you need to treat. You need to do this in real time in the field. It's basically. We had to completely revolutionize the industry from the bottom up.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 32:41]

175 years of history in one white box.

‍

[Saar Safra — 32:45]

That's right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 32:45]

All right. And so what'd you build?

‍

[Saar Safra — 32:47]

We built a different box. We built what is called a BeeHome. It's still a box, but it operates a little bit differently. The bees are in there in the same frames. The biology is the same for the bees. Same frame, same honeycombs that they're used to. But we have a layer of cameras that monitor the bees 24/7. And again, our beehive can contain 10 colonies. That's 10 times.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 33:11]

So 10 boxes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 33:12]

10 boxes, yeah. That's between half a million to a million bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 33:16]

Okay, so first of all, it's a much bigger. Your box is a bigger box.

‍

[Saar Safra — 33:18]

It's like a big dinner table.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 33:20]

Because you can do 10 colonies.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Much bigger box. Is it made out of wood?

‍

[Saar Safra — 33:25]

No, it's made out of tin.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 33:26]

Tin, yeah. Is that good for the bees? It gets hotter in there, I bet.

‍

[Saar Safra — 33:29]

No, no, no. We thermoregulate. So I'll talk about the box in a second. But it has cameras that monitor the bees, and it has AI models that actually identify what's going on with the bees. By the way, these AI models, we don't use LLMs or like the new kind of new models out there. We had to build our own model, which is called a LBM. A large biological model.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 33:50]

Not a large bee model.

‍

[Saar Safra — 33:51]

A large biological. You can do a large bee model as well. But we have to monitor up to a million bees using cameras and other sensors. Sound, temperature, vibrations, and humidity. And we have to. The model has to identify what is going on with the bees in the device. It's incredible. Even if you put a thousand people around a million bees, we would not be able to tell every single bee in every single colony what's going on. The model does. In milliseconds, the model looks at all this data and can tell you this colony is hungry. This colony is sick. This is the virus that it has. Not only that, it's sick. Which virusiIt actually has. This colony, there's pesticides outside. Shut down the device. The model tells you everything. And then we also added a robotic, a robot inside this box, a small robot that can navigate along the hives and. And apply the treatment in real time.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 34:46]

It's a robotic arm? It's a robot on wheels?

‍

[Saar Safra — 34:49]

It's a robot on wheels.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Inside the tin.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

And it has two arms.

‍

[Saar Safra — 34:53]

Yeah. It can Pull out frames. It can put in medicine, it can put in food, it can put in water. It can shut down the entrances and open them up after 12 hours to prevent pesticides from coming in.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 35:04]

Okay, so if it's in the field and you know that they're gonna put pesticides out, you know, fumigate the field with pesticides, you can shut the bee home down.

‍

[Saar Safra — 35:14]

It does it automatically.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 35:15]

It does automatically.

‍

[Saar Safra — 35:16]

The nice thing about this is everybody talks about how AI will kill us eventually. We actually see AI, how it's helping humanity. We have thousands of these devices in the field operating 24/7. They're all solar powered. And the AI identifies and decides and defines what to do. It programs the robot to go apply treatment. And this is being done right now as we speak, from California to Florida, from Texas to North Dakota, all over the US.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 35:46]

So just to be clear though, this is. We call this AI and you call this an LBM, by the way, I was just thinking about. You could have called it BLM. It could have been Bee Lives Matter. Could have taken the sting of some of the other BLM things out of the.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:03]

They're already taking BLM. Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:05]

You could have rehabilitated it and repented it.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:09]

Repurposed it.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:10]

Repurposed it, yeah. So this is machine vision, right? You got cameras, machine.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:15]

Among other things.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:15]

Yeah, among other things. What are the other elements of the technology?

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:18]

So there's a lot of data inputs, temperature, humidity of the colonies. They produce their own temperature.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Multisensor environment.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Vibrations and sound.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:27]

Whoa, vibrations. What is that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:28]

Because bees have the waggle dance. They are.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:31]

Waggle dance?

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:32]

Are you not familiar with that?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:34]

No.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:34]

What kind of bee lover are you? I thought you were an expert, by the way you present yourself.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:38]

I'm in the old fashioned when I got those white boxes in my fields. Yeah, because you didn't supply me a bee home.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:44]

I remember that. You're still holding that against me, aren't you?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 36:46]

I am, actually. You promised.

‍

[Saar Safra — 36:49]

So the idea with, with bees is bees communicate using vibrations and pheromones. Those are the two ways bees communicate. So a bee will find a source of food, it will fly back to its colony, and using a dance, it will actually direct all the colony to the source of the food. It will direct them via direction, distance, and kind of how it is related to the sun, using a dance. The bees understand that dance, and then they go as a group to swarm on that food source.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 37:26]

Yeah, interesting.

‍

[Saar Safra — 37:27]

Yeah, we monitor that, the AI, and this is the beauty of it. Right. AI, it can gather humongous amounts of data, connect the dots, do predictive analysis. It knows what the bees is doing, so it can identify what is going on and then very quickly apply treatments. It doesn't. At the beginning, it didn't always apply the right treatment. There's also reinforcement learning. There's different type of neural networks in there, convolutional and recurrent, and some of them are reinforcement. So it tries different things and it learns, and over time, it becomes really good. Today we have the best beekeeper on the planet. Supersedes any other human beekeeper that you can imagine.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:06]

It's just not human.

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:07]

It's not human. And we see treatments that are being applied in the Negev [southern] Desert locally that have been learned in Arizona because the environment had

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:19]

Meaning the human beekeeper in the Negev Desert, or do you have.

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:21]

No, the robot beekeeper.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:23]

Do you have BeeHomes in the Negev Desert?

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:24]

Yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:25]

I didn't get one.

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:27]

You're never going to let that go, are you?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:28]

No, but. No. Relentlessness is one of my characteristics. I got it from my grandmother. The.

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:34]

That's one of the things you need as an entrepreneur investor. Right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 38:37]

It's true. And so you have a BeeHome in the negative desert and in the Negev Desert and learn from your AI model in Arizona that it needs to do what?

‍

[Saar Safra — 38:48]

Let's just say we. We saw certain behaviors in some of our BeeHomes in the desert here that we thought were unusual. We didn't understand why they were happening. And when we kind of. We did the kind of, the backwards kind of analysis, we realized that these were learnings and reinforcement learnings that happened very, very far away in Arizona.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 39:13]

They came back to your central model from data picked up in Arizona, and then it changed the behavior of the beehive in the Negev Desert. But this could be dangerous also. Right. Because the model who does this in an automated way may pick up on something in Arizona that actually does not apply to the climate or the circumstances of the pesticides used in the Negev Desert. And you could end up screwing up the bee colony in the Negev Desert and hurting our food supply. Because of what happened in Arizona.

‍

[Saar Safra — 39:40]

The first heart transplant. Human died. You remember that, right? That was in the 1960s. But

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 39:46]

I don't remember that. I'm not that old.

‍

[Saar Safra — 39:47]

No, but not being old, but it's a well known. But my point being is

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 39:52]

You asked if I remembered that. I remember you didn't give me a BeeHome. I don't remember the first heart transplant guy died.

‍

[Saar Safra — 39:58]

That's a common theme. That's kind of come back on me. I get it. Okay. I think I have no option but to bring you a BeeHome after this.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 40:05]

That's why you've been invited to the podcast.

‍

[Saar Safra — 40:07]

I have one in my car in a trunk. I can bring it over. But point being is that during the. Again, we're seven years into it. We've had by this point, almost a trillion videos and photos fed into the models.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 40:23]

Wow.

‍

[Saar Safra — 40:23]

And our model is centralized. It's in the cloud. You know, we're an Amazon shop, an AWS shop. And so that's why I'm saying the learnings apply. We also have, by the way, BeeHomes in Dubai today. These are the only three locations we have on the planet in the US And Israel and in Dubai.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 40:41]

All great allies today.

‍

[Saar Safra — 40:42]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 40:43]

Members of the Abraham Accords.

‍

[Saar Safra — 40:44]

That's right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 40:45]

It's an Abrahamic bee colony.

‍

[Saar Safra — 40:47]

But also all challenging areas for bees, which kind of extend our technology and prove why it's so important in the UAE, by the way, until our devices, 100% of their bee population dies every single year. It just can't withstand the summer.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 41:04]

It's too hot for the bees in the summer.

‍

[Saar Safra — 41:06]

Too hot for the bees. And so they buy bees every year. They need bees for pollination, for honey. They have a very unique honey that they do only over there called cedar. It's. It's actually almost as good as Manuka. Some even say better. And it's only grown through the mangrove trees in the UAE, the only place on the planet.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 41:25]

Why is that? There are mangrove trees in other places.

‍

[Saar Safra — 41:28]

That's true, but characteristics that exist there. I'm not sure why, but theirs is very unique and different.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 41:36]

And I've seen Dubai chocolate branded like in airports. I've never seen Dubai honey.

‍

[Saar Safra — 41:40]

The cedar honey you can read about, it's called cedar. There's a lot of types of mangrove honey, but the cedar honey specifically is one of the best qualities on the planet. But my point being for us, you know, we wanted to take our technology and challenge it in the most extreme area. So you can get North Dakota during the winter. Yeah, that's easy. We got that. And then you can get Dubai during the summer. And if you can kind of help bees survive in these extreme environments, you know, you kind of. You have a good.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:09]

What do you do? Air conditioning for the bees in the tin can?

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:11]

We thermoregulate. That's true.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:12]

You refer to, let me say, use the word air conditioning. You thermoregulate the bees. We do.

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:17]

Because it's more than just air conditioning. Right. Some of it is passive. There's airflows that are open and closed to conserve energy, but some of it is also active, like in the desert. There's enough sun that you can actually air condition all. All summer long.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:32]

Solar powered air conditioning for the bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:34]

Yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:35]

You always want better for your bees.

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:36]

Yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:37]

And how many units do you have in Dubai?

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:39]

Oh, just a few.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:40]

Just a few. But it's working.

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:42]

It's. It's beautiful.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:43]

And the bees survive through the summer?

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:45]

Yes, they do.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 42:46]

So you're like growing a new bee colony in Dubai. What did they do before you could fly in bees to Dubai? They didn't have honey, I guess.

‍

[Saar Safra — 42:53]

No, they would transport them on trucks or on trains. Yeah, on boats.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

On boats?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Yeah. You can, you can move. You can haul bees around the world in many, many different means ways.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:04]

And what do they want to pollinate for there or they just want the honey?

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:07]

Both. You know, Dubai, especially after. Not only Dubai, but like after Covid.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:14]

Yeah.

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:14]

Remember when the. This is something you do remember, right? When the ports closed down.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:18]

Yes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:19]

Many countries that are kind of dependent on external, on imports were in a bind because everything shut down. You couldn't get food and suddenly people realize that bees are part of your national security. You know, in the US there's the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture. Bees are not categorized under the USDA. They're categorized under the DOD - Department of Defense.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:45]

Really?

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:45]

Bees are considered in the United States of America as national security.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:50]

In Israel, are they considered a national security beast?

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:52]

No, they're not.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 43:52]

They're not. In Dubai are they under national security?

‍

[Saar Safra — 43:54]

I don't know. But in the US the funding for the bees comes from the Department of Defense.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 44:00]

This actually makes sense, by the way, that, you know, your food security is a matter of national security and should be treated as such.

‍

[Saar Safra — 44:07]

That's my point.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 44:08]

It's very forward thinking of both the Emiratis

‍

[Saar Safra — 44:10]

That's exactly right.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 44:12]

And, and Israel to. Actually, you know, the Emiratis have started to think about this very clearly. I know Qatar also thought about this and Israel kind of thinks about this, but not sufficiently. It's forward thinking of the United States to put it in the Department of Defense.

‍

[Saar Safra — 44:27]

Yes. I think the Emiratis understand very well. Again, everybody knows they're very strategic about everything. And they think, they understand that pollination is, if you want to have a vibrant agricultural industry, pollination is part of that and they understand that today. So does for example, Singapore and other kind of island states. Right. Understand that that are highly dependent on income on imports today, suddenly start to identify and understand that not only the bees, but the technology that keeps the bees alive is equally as important.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:03]

There's I assume, insatiable demand for this.

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:05]

Yeah, there's 11 times more demand than actually device actual devices have.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:10]

And so how do you handle that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:12]

We raise capital for manufacturing and we raise debt for manufacturing. It's a slow process. We're still a startup.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:18]

How many can you produce a year of these BeeHomes?

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:20]

So we work with contract manufacturers in Mexico because most of our biggest market is in the US it's easier to manufacture in Mexico and just transport to the land. Our current manufacturer can manufacture 6,500 a year.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:34]

6,500 BeeHomes a year.

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:36]

BeeHomes a year.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:36]

6,500 BeeHomes a year that each holds 10 hives.

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:39]

Correct. We don't. We. We're not there yet. We only manufacture about a thousand a year. We're still in the early process of that. But hopefully some more good news around that coming in.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 45:49]

And I assume you're sold out on your thousand BeeHomes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 45:51]

Yeah, yeah. No, we. We have a couple of thousand. They're all sold out. But. But like I said, we've already been paid for 11,000 BeeHomes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 46:01]

Right.

‍

[Saar Safra — 46:01]

So we're waiting for many more to come.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 46:03]

We got to find another place to manufacture. Maybe we'll manufacture them in Dubai. They're good at that.

‍

[Saar Safra — 46:06]

Yeah, that's. That's one of the things we're thinking about because in Dubai or in the UAE, not necessarily Dubai, but in the UAE they really offer in there. They have like a. No tax zones.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 46:16]

Yeah.

‍

[Saar Safra — 46:16]

And they offer incredible incentives if you want to manufacture. There is some of something we're considering—

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 46:23]

What is like play this movie forward 10 years and there's now, I don't know, 20,000 BeeHomes around. What has changed in the world? What will I notice? What will the average person listening to this podcast notice is changed in the world because of your. Because of BeeHomes?

‍

[Saar Safra — 46:37]

The first and foremost, the way I think about it is usually is always I start from the unit level, at the bee level. We measure our success by colony collapse. So instead of seeing 30, 40, 50, 60% colony collapse in the industry, in our devices, we experience less than 8% colony collapse across our device. This is not in the lab, in the field across our devices. And again we have thousands of them, which gives us high confidence that this is something we can maintain. And it keeps going down. Right. So all these BeeHomes are being software updated every week, once a week, over the air, with just bug fixes, enhancements, improvements.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 47:20]

Bug fixes. That's a good one.

‍

[Saar Safra — 47:22]

Not bee fixes, bug fixes. And so this is how we kind of control colony collapse. And that's our success metric, because if you have more bees, you have better pollination and they produce more honey, so your yields go up. Right. So if it works at the unit level. Now take every one of these devices, throw them anywhere you want on the planet, especially in places that need them, like Africa and South America. Plenty of sun, they're solar powered, and you will dramatically increase or decrease the colony collapse rates in those areas. What is the outcome of that? Higher yields. For the same piece of land, you would get better yield of the crop.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 48:01]

So lower cost of food.

‍

[Saar Safra — 48:03]

Lower cost of food. Better quality of food. Yeah. And most of all, it's great for the biodiversity of that area, because bees don't only pollinate the avocado flowers, they will pollinate any type of flower in that region in that, you know, three mile radius that they will bump into.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 48:20]

That's a bee radius, is three miles?

‍

[Saar Safra — 48:23]

Usually that's the comfort zone. A bee can fly even 40 miles, but the comfort zone she pollinates in is 3 miles.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 48:29]

Interesting.

‍

[Saar Safra — 48:29]

If she doesn't have a home to come back to, you can fly way further than three miles.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 48:34]

So you created something called, like an impact report. What do you call it? You have a good name for it. What is it called?

‍

[Saar Safra — 48:40]

Every year we release our impact report and we actually count. What is the true impact of what we did? And we measure that about how many bees we saved, because we compare that to the wooden boxes. If you take bees from the wooden box and move them to our tin box, to our robotic hive, you will save 30 to 40% of all that bee colonies that will stay alive in our device.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 49:04]

So there's a lot of talk today about AI replacing people's jobs. This clearly replaces the beekeeper. What does the average beekeeper say about the BeeHome?

‍

[Saar Safra — 49:18]

Out of all the constituents and stakeholders in the industry, the beekeepers love us the most.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 49:25]

Whoa.

‍

[Saar Safra — 49:26]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 49:26]

Why?

‍

[Saar Safra — 49:28]

First of all, we're not replacing beekeepers. We're replacing the labor that doesn't exist. Remember how I told you there's one beekeeper for every thousand hives, which is why they lose so many colonies? It's not that's what they want. There's just not labor. There's no labor to be found to actually increase that rate. How many people do you know that finished school and decided, I'm going to be a beekeeper for the rest of my life?

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 49:51]

I know two.

‍

[Saar Safra — 49:52]

Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 49:52]

I don't know if they finished school. I know two beekeepers.

‍

[Saar Safra — 49:55]

But. But, you know, many more that are not. And so point. Point being, Right. Point being is that. Is that there's just not enough labor. Especially with the cost of labor today going up in the western world, it's really hard to find labor. And so we're not really replacing the beekeeper's job. But what are we doing? We don't have bees. We don't grow bees. We were a technology company. We provide the box. You still need the beekeeper, but it—

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 50:20]

The bees

‍

[Saar Safra — 50:22]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 50:23]

Grow in the box. They multiply.

‍

[Saar Safra — 50:23]

But the bees are not ours. The bees are not our asset. It's the beekeepers. The beekeepers have to bring in the bees so we can.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 50:30]

So there's a beekeeper per each one of your boxes.

‍

[Saar Safra — 50:32]

Correct. Not a beekeeper per se, but there's an owner of the bees. That's the commercial beekeeper. He has 10,000 colonies. We come to him, and we go together to the growers. We go to Olam and Driscolls and the big growers, and we tell them it's the same bees you're used to. You've been using this beekeeper for 30 years.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 50:53]

I got it. Your customers, the commercial beekeepers. Who instead of shipping wood boxes, is now shipping a tin can.

‍

[Saar Safra — 50:58]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 50:59]

That has the equivalent of 10 colonies in it.

‍

[Saar Safra — 51:02]

Correct.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 51:03]

A funny question. So your AI kills, like, 99%. I saw somewhere of Varroa mites without any chemicals, without anything. Just explain to the common listener what that means..

‍

[Saar Safra — 51:17]

Wow. Varroa is the worst thing that could happen to humans, and it doesn't even affect us. It's a mite on the bees. So there is a mite that 100% of the bees have them. If it would be on a human, it would be the size of a backpack. It's as if you'd be wearing a backpack. It sits on the back of a bee or in the torso of a bee, and it basically consumes the bee's liver and health system. So the bees lose all their immunity with this varroa, and so they're very susceptible to disease. Varroa is the worst thing that could happen to bees and to pollination to humans. 100% of the bees have it. And so today in nature for example, a bee colony could not last more than a year. If it doesn't have beekeepers helping, it won't last more than a year. The only treatment that beekeepers have for varroa is a chemical treatment. They basically put chemicals inside the hive. This is why in the US There is no organic honey. Honey cannot be organic even if the forage is organic.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 52:18]

That's interesting.

‍

[Saar Safra — 52:19]

There's still chemicals inside the hive to treat for varroa. What we do is we use a heat treatment. There's a difference in how much temperature bees can sustain versus varroa. Kind of like when you're sick, you raise temperature, you have fever, your body is using fever to fight pathogens. You can sustain 100, 105, or 44 celcius.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 52:39]

The pathogen can't.

‍

[Saar Safra — 52:40]

We use a similar method with the bees.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 52:42]

You give the bee. You give the bees fever.

‍

[Saar Safra — 52:44]

We give them fever, which they can sustain. It's fine for about 40 minutes. It kills all the varroa. We have 99.9%

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 52:53]

Who came up with this? It's incredible.

‍

[Saar Safra — 52:55]

It's not actually our patent, but what happens is it's not really feasible in the field. What are you going to do? You're going to come with a microwave to the field for every wooden box, wait 40 minutes for each frame. We have a robot that does it 24/7 for three days, takes care of 10 hives at no cost. It's all solar-powered. It's beautiful. So the idea that with a robot is you can apply treatments that are not scalable. Right. That are very effective and intimate because you have a robot. That's why we're not replacing beekeepers. A beekeeper would never do this. They will still use chemicals. We're the only commercial player in the market today that manages tens of thousands of colonies that does not use chemicals for honey. The only ones on the planet.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 53:41]

You'll be introducing organic honey into the United States for the first time ever.

‍

[Saar Safra — 53:46]

We're going to try. We're going to try.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 53:49]

Before we came on, there was a joke going on in the back here about honey laundering. Want to tell everyone about honey laundering?

‍

[Saar Safra — 53:57]

You know, it's a term we coined. It's like money laundering. Basically, today

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

I figured that out.

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

I'm just saying it's not a term you'd hear anywhere else, but basically today, there's a lot of honey that is being dumped on the markets that is not real honey. It's rice syrup or corn syrup. It looks like honey. It has the same texture, but it's just the worst sweetener on planet Earth. It has so many negative impacts on the human body. It shouldn't be consumed, but it's being sold as honey and that's called dumping. There's anti-dumping rules all over the world, especially in the western countries, which is why there's different routes that this honey goes through different countries like Vietnam that sells it to India, that sells it to Argentina, that sells it to the US, kind of like money laundering routes. And eventually you buy honey off the shelf. But only 10% of it is real honey. 90% of it is a sweetener that just does harm to your body.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 55:03]

Where do they make this rice crap that they call honey or the corn crap they call honey?

‍

[Saar Safra — 55:11]

In various countries around the world.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 55:15]

You don't want to say which countries?

‍

[Saar Safra — 55:17]

I don't know specifically.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 55:18]

They are not being what percentage of the honey in the United States is sold after it was honey laundered?

‍

[Saar Safra — 55:23]

Let's just say that in the US there's very specific rules that don't allow imports of honey from China.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Does some get in anyway?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Through honey laundering routes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 55:34]

Through honey laundering. So what percentage of honey in the United States do you think is actually honey laundered?

‍

[Saar Safra — 55:37]

This is not based on facts, just based on my hunch. 60 to 70%.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 55:45]

Wow. 60 to 70% of all the honey you buy in your Kroger's, your Albertsons, I assume the supermarkets are still around, your Eagles. It has honey laundered honey in it and it's only 10% real honey or 20% real honey, as the case may be. There was similar problem with olive oil, by the way, coming out of Europe for a while also. Right. They would put other kinds of oil and olive oil and call it olive oil.

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:07]

And they solved it. Solved it.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:09]

How'd they solve it?

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:11]

So in Europe, actually they now they invented a technology that can actually tell you in a honey jar how much of it is actually real honey. It's relatively a novel piece of technology. So it's not kind of widespread yet. But in Europe they're starting to kind of really crack down on that. So they're going to be less affected by it. But the U.S. by the way, in the U.S. only about 25 to 30% of the honey that is being consumed in the U.S. is produced in the U.S.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

Where do they get it from?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

Imports.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 0:00]

From where?

‍

[Saar Safra — 0:00]

It doesn't matter.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:43]

Got it.

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:44]

Because of honey laundering, eventually you get the same honey from the same places, going through all the different places.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:49]

Wow. Wow.

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:51]

The same thing applies here in Israel, by the way.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:53]

We have honey laundering here too?

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:54]

Yeah, from the same sources of honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:57]

Really?

‍

[Saar Safra — 56:58]

Same problems. Yeah.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 56:59]

Who are the perpetrators here in Israel?

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:01]

The thing is that they don't even know because they're buying honey from Turkey or Vietnam. But you don't know the route that this honey came from.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 57:11]

What's the safest way to ensure I don't get laundered honey?

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:16]

Buy honey from your local beekeeper. Seriously. Go to the local beekeeper and there's always a beekeeper around somewhere in the vicinity.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 57:22]

Sure, in Tel Aviv you can always find one on the corner.

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:25]

No, but like, you know, you drive an hour away. Tel Aviv, you don't even have to drive an hour. Just drive 30 minutes and you're like in the outskirts. Find a beekeeper. Sunday markets or just shops that sell beekeepers honey. And buy the honey from there. That's real honey.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 57:40]

Who's your favorite beekeeper in Israel that you like to buy honey from?

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:43]

I can't. I can't play favorites.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 57:44]

You love all your beekeepers.

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:45]

I love my beekeeper.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 57:46]

Tell me. So your partner Eliyah is a beekeeper. I've met him. He's an incredible guy. Big, long beard. He still have the beard? I haven't seen him a few years and I think you couldn't have two more different backgrounds. You're a high tech guy, he's a beekeeper. What have you learned from each other?

‍

[Saar Safra — 57:59]

I've learned so much from him. He's just again, think about his journey. He started from. He was a commercial beekeeper. That's what he went to school for. He learned beekeeping. He worked at beekeeping. Today he manages our revenue teams in the U.S. he lives in the U.S. you relocated him. I totally made him a different person.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 58:19]

Where is he, California?

‍

[Saar Safra — 58:21]

Yeah, in the Bay Area. Our offices are in San Ramon. So he's like 45 minutes across the bridge. He manages our revenue team, a huge team of about 25 people doing both sales and operations. He went to get there, he went through being the product manager of the company. And at the beginning, he was kind of more the subject matter expert. But in seven years, what this guy has accomplished, what he learned, the progress he went through, he barely knew how to use a computer. He knew how to write an email, but it would take him 20 minutes to write two sentences. Today, the guy is a wizard.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 58:56]

Wow.

‍

[Saar Safra — 58:57]

He's a wizard. You would see him, you'd be blown away.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 58:59]

An AI beekeeper.

‍

[Saar Safra — 59:00]

He talks the language. He talks both languages. He can go and talk to beekeepers about beekeeping and he go and talks to investors VCs about venture capital.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 59:12]

I think I'm correct - you have teams in the US and teams in Israel. And you have a team in the Ukraine also, right?

‍

[Saar Safra — 59:17]

We have a team in Ukraine. We have a team in Poland and—

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 59:20]

a team in Poland. So you've confronted managing a company through war for the last four years. What are your key insights and pieces of advice and thoughts on that?

‍

[Saar Safra — 59:34]

I think that you mentioned this at the beginning, right? Being relentless and being flexible. You know, we've been tested around those traits in the company. I mean, it's like black swan one after the other, right? Started with COVID then the interest rates around the world collapsed and wars, wars, wars. Both in Ukraine than in Israel. Like we have people serendipitously all over the place wherever there's war, I feel like. But yeah, I mean, it's a challenge to maintain talent and maintain throughput throughout these circumstances, I would say. I can't pinpoint and say there's something specific that we did, right or wrong. I'm sure we did every mistake in the book along the way. We're still around, but that's also never guaranteed, right? We're still around.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 60:31]

What's something you'd like to say to your employees in Israel and the Ukraine and conversely, let's say in the US who haven't gone through the war about these periods?

‍

[Saar Safra — 60:39]

I'll say one thing. Because we build hardware, right? It's a much harder endeavor to maintain because you can't do that from home. We don't have a hybrid model, we never had. We work from the office and our offices in Israel are 6 km from the Lebanon border. And my team is there every single day, as I am almost every day, except when I'm not doing podcasts in Tel Aviv. We're there every day. And so I couldn't be proud and I couldn't be more fortunate really, to have a team of honestly warriors that come to work every day. You know, in our hiring process, you have to specifically mention your passion towards our cause, unsolicited. You can be the most amazing software developer throughout your entire hiring process, which is long. If you have not mentioned your attraction to our cause and the reason why, this is part of the reason why you want to work at Beewise. We're not going to hire you. It doesn't matter how talented you are. That helps a lot. Bring people in adverse situations, conflicts and war, to work. Because the war is local, it will pass, saving the bees is a global issue. It's not going to go away. And we're in a, the real war we have is with time. You mentioned this at the beginning, right? Losing 30, 40, 50, 60% every year. We're 20 years away, honestly, on the planet today, we have 36% of the bee stock we had 50 years ago. That's it. That's what's left. There's no way to replenish beyond that. Once that's gone, it's gone. We'll need a different solution to pollinate our crops. And so that's the real war in our minds. Every minute, every hour, we can sneak in to the office, work and promote this solution for the bees is important. It's almost like a religion for us, it's not, but it's. It's as strong as a belief, you know, like a conviction. Not a religion, a conviction for people that work at Beewise. And that's one of the things. That's kind of one of the. They all work at Beewise. That's a common thing. But the other common denominator, the other thread that connects us is we're all passionate towards the mission of saving the bees and protecting our global food supply.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 63:10]

I'll finish with one last question. What can human beings learn from bees?

‍

[Saar Safra — 63:15]

You know, it's pretty amazing. Every day I go to work, I learn something new from the bees. Bees are part of nature. It's basically learning from nature. And nature is all about risk management. We don't appreciate our farmers as much, but farmers, we think as technologists, we're engineers. So everything is structured, and if you do this, this happens. And if you add this to that, one plus one equals two. In nature, that's not how it works. It's all risk management. And so bees are an integral part of that. And you learn so much every single day. I can talk about the bees for hours. And you will be blown away how nature has invented neural networks way before we even understood what they are. Right? A bee colony is 50,000, you know, dots on that neural network that communicate and decide together democratically what to do. And that's been going on for 150 million years on the planet in every single beehive that we're not even aware. There's just so much to learn from the bees that is credible. But I do want to say one more thing while we're at the subject. Some of us take the world for granted. And I want to encourage anybody that's listening to this podcast to apply themselves in their current job or their next job or their next endeavor to doing something good for the planet, for the world. It's just as exciting and interesting as doing software in cyber or in defense. But if you apply yourself towards the planet in many different capacities, you can do carbon, you can do ag, you can do different things. If each and every one of us will do a little bit of that, then we wouldn't be in such a bind. We are in a bind on this planet. Right. Everybody knows this. We just don't know to what extent where, you know, the world is not going in the right direction. And I encourage people to consider in their next job doing something that is meaningful and impactful to the planet so we can leave our kids a better place.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 65:19]

We're going to have to do another follow up podcast because I'm not sure I agreed with everything in your last sentence, but we're coming to the end of time. So I have to leave people with a cliffhanger because Gavin Baker said here that climate change is a solved problem in his lifetime. I think the depopulation of the world is a big problem. And one can argue that the food supply dwindling or challenged, which you're going to fix because technology tends to fix these problems, because innovative people tend to fix these problems and you will fix this problem is also somewhat solved, unfortunately, by people depopulating the planet. And so I'm actually less of a doomer about where the planet is going than when you are, because I believe specifically in people like you and in young people who will solve these problems. And I think, I don't think we're in a bind. I think we're going through more complicated points of history on the human level even than we are on the planet level. But it'll be an amazing conversation to have.

‍

[Saar Safra — 66:17]

I wasn't talking about climate change.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 66:19]

Okay. Not just climate change, food supply and climate change. I do think food supplies is a national infrastructure issue that needs to be dealt with more. I agree with that.

‍

[Saar Safra — 66:26]

But we're saying the same thing you're saying. Smart people will solve it through technology. I'm trying to encourage people to go and do exactly that.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 66:33]

Amazing. So on that we definitely agree, which is let's call all the smart people to go engage in doing things that, where values actually create value. Which is the nature of this podcast. Where values create value.

‍

[Saar Safra — 66:46]

Yes.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 66:47]

Amazing. Saar, thanks for joining us. Thank you for everything you're doing to increase the global food supply and reduce the cost of living. Because this is critically important - people are not buying fresh fruits and vegetables because they're too damn expensive and you, by increasing yield, are helping to bring down the cost of food. So God bless you and Eliyah for doing that.

‍

[Saar Safra — 67:06]

Thank you.

‍

[Michael Eisenberg — 67:07]

And keep up the great work on bringing AI to save bee colonies and robots alongside beekeepers, because we'll live alongside the robots and the AI to make the world a better place. And with that, by the way, I hope we're gonna have b-roll by the way, showing a lot of the bees and the beekeepers and the beehives, et cetera. And with that, thank you Saar. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can find out more about Saar on X and his X handle is S A A R S A F R A and you can also find him on LinkedIn under the same name. Having thanks Saar for helping the planet. I should also disclose that I am a small angel investor in Beewise as well because I could not not join him and Eliyah on this journey to increase the food supply, reduce the cost of living and improve our planet. Thanks for joining.

‍