Fiona Edwards Murphy takes Gold!
29th October 2019
Dublin Start Up Week ended with the annual National Start Up Awards in Dublin City Hall last night. Established in 2012, the National Start Up Awards received over 900 applications in 2019 for 13 categories covering all areas of startup activity. ApisProtect, a Cork agtech company using sensor technology to reduce honey bee losses and improve the health of honey bees was awarded Gold in both the Tech Start Up of the Year and AgTech Start Up of the Year categories.
Dr Fiona Edwards Murphy, CEO and Co Founder of ApisProtect accepted the awards “Our mission at ApisProtect, is to save the honey bees, because if we don’t take action now, we’ll lose our most important insect ally. We want to secure the supply of one third of our diet, and make sure we can nourish and feed the 9.7 billion people on planet earth by 2050. It is a great honour to be recognised for our work in this area.”
Winners from the National Startup Awards go forward to represent Ireland at the European Start Up Awards organised by the European Commission.
ApisProtect is currently monitoring the health of twenty million honey bees across 100,000 acres in Europe, North America, and South Africa. With this new technology beekeepers will no longer need to rely solely on periodic, manual hive checks that can allow disease, pests and other issues to deteriorate hive health beyond rescue.
Dr Edwards Murphy highlighted the importance of using intelligent sensor technology to monitor honey bee colonies “In some countries, up to 40 percent of our honey bees are dying every year. A host of problems, diseases, and pests are devastating hive populations around the globe. It’s becoming harder and harder every year for beekeepers to manage the variety of problems their bees are experiencing.”
Contributing €153 billion worth of pollination to the agri-food industry annually, honey bees play an essential role in global food production. One third of all food that we eat depends on pollinators, and there are 91 million managed beehives worldwide.
