Sde Eliyahu and Bio Bee: Bugs That Save the World’s Crops

Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in the Beit She’an Valley is home to Bio Bee, one of Israel’s most innovative agricultural companies and a world leader in biological pest control. Instead of using chemical pesticides, Bio Bee breeds beneficial insects and mites that eat the pests, producing a natural, chemical-free solution that is used in agriculture across 50 countries.

Bio Bee

Bio Bee breeds bumblebees for pollination, predatory mites that eat spider mites, and sterile fruit flies that suppress wild populations. The company’s products have revolutionized organic farming and integrated pest management worldwide. The visitor center offers tours that explain the science, show the insect-breeding facilities, and demonstrate how a religious kibbutz in the Jordan Valley became a global leader in sustainable agriculture.

A Religious Kibbutz with a Mission

Sde Eliyahu is a religious kibbutz, one of a network of Orthodox kibbutzim that combine communal living with Jewish observance. Founded in 1939, it maintains dairy farming, field crops, and date orchards alongside its high-tech biological operations. The combination of traditional agriculture and cutting-edge science is quintessentially Israeli.

The science behind Bio Bee is elegantly simple in principle and extraordinarily complex in practice. To control spider mites that devastate crops like peppers and strawberries, Bio Bee breeds Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that feeds exclusively on spider mites. To pollinate greenhouse tomatoes and other crops that require buzz pollination, they rear colonies of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) that are shipped in cardboard hives to farms worldwide. To fight the Mediterranean fruit fly, one of the most destructive agricultural pests on Earth, Bio Bee breeds millions of sterile male flies using irradiation, the Sterile Insect Technique. When released into the wild, these sterile males mate with wild females, producing no offspring and gradually crashing the pest population. It is pest control without a single drop of poison.

The scale of the operation is remarkable. Bio Bee exports to over 50 countries, from European greenhouses to African cotton fields to Asian orchards. The company has played a central role in making Israel one of the world leaders in agricultural technology, a country that manages to feed itself and export produce despite having some of the least hospitable farming conditions on the planet. That all of this emerged from a small religious kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, where Shabbat is observed, prayers are recited three times a day, and the sabbatical year (shmita) agricultural laws are kept, only adds to the improbability of the story.

Visit with Hoshen Tours

Sde Eliyahu and Bio Bee demonstrate how Israeli innovation transforms global agriculture. Hoshen Tours pairs this unique visit with the springs at Gan HaShlosha, the mosaic at Beit Alpha, the fortress at Belvoir Castle, and the border story at Naharayim.