Protecting Pollination and Agriculture in Nepal's Terai

Beekon exists to protect one of the quietest, hardest-working infrastructures of global agriculture: pollination.

As floods become more frequent and destructive, beekeepers around the world have watched entire colonies disappear overnight. The traditional wooden beehive has been the standard for more than 200 years, but is no longer designed for our current climate. When water rises, beekeepers lives are put at risk, hives sink, bees drown, honey is lost, and the pollination services that nearby farms depend on can vanish in moments. Apiaries can take years to recover. Since most beekeeping happens near agriculture, and most agriculture happens near increasingly flooding bodies of water, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.

Beekon was created to change this reality.

Our work begins with bees, but it extends beyond them. Food systems, rural livelihoods, biodiversity, and climate resilience are all intrinsic to our work. We have developed the world’s first flood-resistant beehive system. Using Archimedes’ Principle of buoyancy, our hive system rises with floodwaters and safely returns to the ground as waters recede. In helping colonies survive extreme weather, Beekon protects the people, crops, and ecosystems that depend on them. As a sweet bonus, the honey inside the hives is protected, too. Our Mission

So, what is our mission? We work to make pollination resilient in a changing climate.

We believe that bees are inherent to the infrastructure that keeps our food systems functioning. Every apple, berry, nut, seed, and flowering crop that depends on pollination is intimately connected to the health and survival of bee colonies.

Our goal is simple: protect bees from flooding so that farmers, beekeepers, and communities can continue to grow food in places increasingly affected by extreme weather. We are building a practical, affordable, and scalable technology for the front lines of climate changes, beginning in regions where agriculture, beekeeping, and flooding already overlap. Unsurprisingly, this overlap covers most of agriculture today. Pollination is essential in flood-prone river valleys, wetlands, coastal farms, and agricultural regions such as Nepal’s Terai for food security and livelihoods.

Background

Most beekeeping happens near agriculture, and much of the world’s agriculture happens near water. Rivers, floodplains, wetlands, coastlines, and irrigated farmland are productive because of water, but that same proximity now creates growing risk.

Flooding can destroy entire apiaries in a single event. When a hive floods, the colony often cannot escape. The bees drown, the hive absorbs water, honey stores are ruined, and beekeepers are often left to rebuild from scratch. For nearby farmers, the loss goes beyond the hive. Pollination services that support crop yields, biodiversity, and recovery of landscapes post-disaster are gone.

Our current agricultural system treats hives as replaceable, but that logic breaks down in a world where flooding is more common, more expensive, and more destructive. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the United States, more than 200,000 managed hives were lost in a matter of days, with estimates of more than 100 million dollars USD in losses from hive replacement costs alone. Elevating hives can help in minor flooding, but it often fails in sever events. Emergency relocation is labour-intensive, dangerous, and not always possible when roads are flooded or storms arrive quickly.

The wooden hive has served agriculture for centuries, but it is no longer enough on its own.

Solution

Beekon has developed and patented a buoyant beehive system designed to protect colonies during flood events.

The system works by allowing supported hives to rise vertically with the surrounding water level. An anchoring rod keeps keeps the hive level, while a buoyant platform lifts the colony above danger. Once the water recedes, the hive settles back down to its original resting position, allowing beekeepers to continue managing the colony as usual.

Unlike existing (and temporary) flood responses, the Beekon system is self-activating. It does not require a beekeeper to be present during a storm or flash flood. It does not depend on last-minute relocation. It does not ask farmers to risk their safety to save their hives.

The core design is made from recycled HDPE, durable, and intended to integrate into real agricultural systems. It is built for beekeepers and farmers who need a real, practical tool to protect their crop and pollination services. Our updated design even supports existing beehive integration.

Opportunity

Flood-resistant pollination creates an opportunity to rethink where and how beekeeping can happen.

In many regions, flood-prone landscapes are also highly productive agricultural zones. River valleys, wetlands, coastlines, and monsoon-affected farming regions often support rich biodiversity and strong crop production, but unreliable pollination limits their resilience. If hives can survive flooding, then pollination can remain active in places where it is currently fragile, expensive, or too risky to maintain.

Beekon enables climate-resilient apiaries that can support food production before, during, and after extreme weather events. This has direct value for beekeepers, farmers, governments, insurers, conservation groups, and regenerative agricultural development organizations. This includes the enablement of pollination services in regions that have previously been underutilized, such as mangroves and floodplains.

Our solution also reframes pollination as infrastructure. Like water systems, roads, electricity, and emergency services, pollination needs to keep functioning under stress. Food security depends on it.

How We Regenerate

Beekon’s work is rooted in the belief that climate adaptation should strengthen both ecosystems and the communities that live in synergy with them.

Protecting bees means protecting the floweirng plants they pollinate, the crops they support, the biodiversity they help maintain, and the livelihoods of beekeepers and farmers who rely on them. In flood-prone regions, this matters even more. After a major flood, landscapes need pollination to recover. Farms need pollination to produce. Communities need income stability to rebuild.

Our approach combines resilient design, circular materials, agricultural partnerships, and field-based research into one. We work with beekeepers, researchers, farmers, and local institutions to understand how the technology performs in real environments, not just controlled demonstrations.

This is especially true and important in region’s like Nepal’s Terai, where agriculture, river systems, monsoon flooding, and pollination all intersect. We have partnered with the Agriculture and Forestry University, including adjacent government bodies, to implement and protect both immediate hive protection and long-term learning about climate-resilient food systems in the region.

Tracking Impact

Our most direct metric is hive survival during and after flood events. In tandem with this, we are working to track colony health, hive stability, beekeeper usability, honey preservation, pollination activity, and crop-adjacent benefits. In partnership with researchers around the world, we aim to collect field data before and after flood exposure to better understand how protected pollination affects recovery, productivity, and ecosystem resilience.

The monitoring approach we have designed includes hive inspections, field observations, environmental data, and quantifiable research on top of beekeeper feedback. We also recognize that our impact work is not only numerical, as the experiences of beekeepers, the confidence of farmers, and the safety of communities to produce food after floods all matter.

We have officially partnered with the Agriculture and Forestry University in Chitwan, Nepal, to co-deploy and produce research on pollinator protection as it pertains to the Terai region, which is a mirror of the tropical conditions throughout many regions in the Southern Hemisphere.

Our Experience

Our work began in 2023 after our founder learned of a beekeeper who lost hundreds of hives overnight to flooding in the Philippines. The idea was simple but urgent: if lifejackets work for people, why not build one for bees?

That question became the foundation for Beekon.

Since then, the project has grown from an initial design into a patented beehive system that has undergone early freshwater testing, international partnership development, and recognition across agriculture and climate innovation communities. Beekon has received support through the Jack Rosen Award for Environmental Innovation, Waterloo Climate Con, various Departments of Agriculture around the world, and recognition in Canada from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness. Previously, Beekon also secured funding for a pilot project in Malawi, East Africa and was due for deployment prior to the shuttering of the USAID in 2025.

Our team now brings together experience across engineering, agriculture, physics, business, GIS, and climate resilience. We have been featured by Earth.Org, and are preparing for field deployment with research and agricultural partners in Nepal and beyond.

We have much work do to, but the need we address is not hypothetical. Beekeepers are losing hives. Farmers are facing pollination instability. Climate change is already rewriting what we understand the rules of agriculture to be.

There is no Planet B, but there is a Planet Bee.