Bio-Bee Biological Systems Ltd. is a small company that provides natural forms of biological pest control, in a variety of novel ways, to farmers all over the world from its base in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in northern Israel.
One of Bio-Bee’s latest projects is to provide up to 600 million predatory baby spiders, a.k.a. “mites”, of the species Phytoseiulus Persimilis, to farmers in Colombia over the next year. The Mighty Mites of this spider attack and devour the mites of other species of spider, harmful to crops, which have been decimating farmlands in Columbia.
This therefore provides a completely natural way to help eliminate the harmful species of spiders, which also allows Columbian farmers to cut back on the use of chemical pesticides and to meet ecological goals to help market their products abroad.
The Phytoseiulus Persimilis spider mite, produced by Bio-Bee in its hatcheries on the kibbutz, is double the size of the harmful mites it attacks, and moves around faster too which helps it find lunch: the daily menu for each mite consists of as many as 7 of its smaller victims, which it gobbles up with gruesome relish, sucking out their insides and leaving only the outer skin behind.
This champion Bio-Bee mite grows faster, too, than competing biological alternatives for the task, with a life-cycle from egg to adult of just a single week.
Bottles of the mites, each containing several thousand of the little critters, are distributed to farmers who then scatter them over their farms, in their greenhouses and amongst their fruit orchards. Bio-Bee’s Mighty Mites cost more than their own weight in gold, and thus sell for several thousands dollars just for a few grams – which is almost as expensive as inkjet printing ink!
But they do the job; kept initially in coolers, as soon as they are released into the warm Columbian air on the farms where they are being deployed they will go to work, reproduce and then go on to kill tens of thousands of pests every single day.
Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu is located in the Jordan Valley, approximately five miles south of historical Beit Shea’n and near the border with Jordan in northern Israel.
READ MORE: Biobee
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Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
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Thank you.
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