Cross Pollination: Skyview, HiveTracks Partnership Mixes Solar Energy with Beekeeping
May 5, 2026
4 min read
Renewable energy investor Skyview Ventures announced the expansion of its partnership with environmental and beekeeping platform HiveTracks to scale data-driven monitoring and management across its solar portfolio.
The two companies aim to advance pollinator initiatives by launching the “Biodiversity and Data-Driven Beekeeping Program.” Davis Hill Development, Skyview Venture’s renewable energy development arm, will utilize HiveTracks’ environmental system intelligence to build data infrastructure that measures ecological outcomes directly on-site.
Data from developers, landowners, farmers, and other biodiverse properties will help drive the program’s efforts to bring sustainable agriculture to the green energy sector. The companies state this will occur by empowering beekeepers as field ecologists, as well as leveraging beehives as biosensors to retrieve data for the program’s infrastructure.
An apiary, also known as a “bee yard,” is a designated area where beehives are kept. These apiaries and environmental pollinator habitats being monitored in this program will be integrated into the future solar project development by Davis Hill Development in multiple states in the U.S. The current data has already been incorporated into existing operating solar projects.
Started in 2025, the joint partnership began with eight solar projects across New York, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Tennessee, where Skyview Ventures is headquartered.
Some examples of these solar projects are:
- Christiano Solar—Deerfield, NY
- Lapp Solar— NY Manheim, NY
- St Croix— Schagticocke, NY
- Bramble Farms—WV
As a result of HiveTracks’ success, Skyview Ventures stated that it plans to expand the Biodiversity and Data-Driven Beekeeping Program to additional sites in 2026. Skyview Ventures currently owns 70 megawatt (MW) of solar assets across 15 states and over 600 EV charging stations.
“This partnership reflects our broader vision that renewable energy projects should be developed with long-term environmental stewardship in mind,” Skyview Ventures CEO Andy Karetsky said in a statement. “By integrating biodiversity monitoring, pollinator habitats, and data-driven land management into our solar portfolio, we are demonstrating that solar projects can deliver environmental benefits beyond clean energy generation and play a meaningful role in supporting local ecosystems.”
Skyview Ventures is both an investor in HiveTracks intelligence properties and the company’s first solar industry client. Founded in 2010, HiveTracks was developed by computer science and beekeeping professionals in rural North Carolina. Its footprint has expanded globally to more than 140 countries, supporting over 50,000 beekeepers.
Regarding the Biodiversity and Data-Driven Beekeeping Program, HiveTracks states that each participating solar site is managed by local beekeepers recruited directly by them. They add that the bee yards serve not only for honey production but also to monitor land use impact over time on ecosystem health.
An example of this, Skyview Ventures solar development associate Maria Morales Ferrebus stated, was being able to identify areas with low plant diversity, which can reduce resilience to drought conditions and increase risk of erosion.
“Solar energy already provides environmental benefits, but with HiveTracks, we saw an opportunity to go further,” she added.
By integrating this monitored environmental data into its solar projects, Skyview Ventures' vision is that it will guide long-term management decisions that fuel renewable energy development efforts as a whole.
“Our partnership with Skyview Ventures demonstrates how beekeeping, environmental data, and renewable energy infrastructure can work together to create measurable environmental impact,” said Max Rünzel, CEO of HiveTracks.
The expanded program reflects a broader trend among renewable energy initiatives, where solar development is combined with agriculture and other biodiversity-related initiatives through multiple land strategies. Agrivoltaics, also known as “solar beekeeping,” is becoming another popular trend as economics continue to push renewable energy solutions like wind and solar over traditional fossil-fuel greenhouse gases (GHG) that produce high levels of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) in the atmosphere.
While complementary to apiaries, agrivoltaics is the dual-use integration of solar panels and active farming on the same land. Livestock that graze on vegetation under these panels create habitats for pollinators, like bees.
The evapotranspiration from plants whose health is improved by the active work of pollinators, which is managed by livestock, cools solar panels and improves their energy generation. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, installations have expanded from 27,000 acres with 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in 2020 to over 62,000 acres and 10 GW in 2024. It’s reportedly enough to power 1.5 million homes.
It’s another example of how data-driven beekeeping and biodiversity programs are helping include more rural areas in the transition to renewable energy through solar.
About the Author
Eric Moody
Staff Writer
Eric is a staff writer for the Endeavor Business Media Energy group, which includes EnergyTech, T&D World, and Microgrid Knowledge media brands. He is a Philadelphia native with over nine years of experience in multimedia and print journalism throughout the news industry. He graduated with a B.S. in Communication Studies from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania.
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