BeeFlow's Matias Viel: "Bionic Bees"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matias Viel, founder of Beeflow, to talk about why bees are a big deal (3:05), why they need him (4:50), the almond industry (7:20), the booming bee rental business (9:55), making bees bionic (12:20), training them to pollinate the right plants (15:05), starting out in Argentina (18:50), ending up at IndieBio in San Francisco (23:00), using insects to increase crop yields (25:30), the potential risks involved in bee biotech (27:20), the decline in bee populations (30:20), getting farmers to buy in (32:35), trying to grow the company (35:05), and the coming revolution in agriculture (38:05).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo! Technology!
0:02.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	So you need 2 million bee hives in February in California.
0:09.0	Do you know how many beehives are there all over in the US?
0:13.0	No.
0:14.0	Almost 2 million.
0:15.0	So basically all of America's bees, or controlled bees,
0:20.0	are taken to California over a three-week period.
0:24.5	Exactly.
0:26.5	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds, the top people in tech.
0:35.8	I am throwing a curveball at you this week. So we are not going to be talking
0:40.4	about social media or flying cars or streaming media or any of the fare that you might have come
0:49.5	to expect from this program. Instead, we're going to be talking about bugs, bees in particular.
0:57.6	Now, obviously, you listen to this program, so you are already supremely intelligent. We know that.
1:02.6	So I'm sure that you know that bees are extremely important to just a modern food system as we know it
1:09.7	and how we feed the 7 billion or so people on the
1:13.8	planet bees pollinate a huge sway of the crops that we eat but of course they are in
1:19.7	some pretty dire trouble with colony collapse and all these other things going on so i brought on
1:25.5	the program a super interesting founder. His name is
1:28.6	Matias Viel. And he is the founder of a company called BeeFlow here in San Francisco.
1:35.1	And believe it or not, he's effectively making bees bionic. Yeah. Now, I won't get into the details
1:43.0	here. I'll let Matthias do that very shortly.
	...

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