Alvéole and XNatura®: A 2026 Retrospective

Since spring 2025 XNatura®, the technology developed by 3Bee, has been the digital heart of the biodiversity projects that Alvéole, the Montreal company bringing bees and nature into commercial buildings, creates for major real estate owners in North America and Europe. The roles are clear: Alvéole brings the solution into commercial real estate and supports clients on site, while we provide the sensors, maps and platform that measure what happens around each building. 2026 was the year the collaboration moved from the first buildings to a true network. The first Spectrum sensor was installed on the roof of Alvéole's headquarters in Montreal: from there we look back at what we built together this year.

In February we adopted a new connectivity module certified for the United States and Canada, so sensors can transmit data directly from North American buildings. In spring, a new fleet of Spectrum sensors for pollinators and Birdy sensors for birds was launched, destined for buildings in the United States and Canada. Since spring, a Spectrum has been listening to pollinators on the Empire State Building, and in summer a Birdy joined it: the story of the skyscraper that listens to bees also made it into the Wall Street Journal. In June the first Spectrum and Birdy pairs arrived on rooftops in Montréal, then new sensors in Ottawa and other buildings during summer.

At the start of the year, the XNatura® platform generated the 2026 dataset for every Alvéole site: land cover, biodiversity integrity (MSA), pollinator indicators, heat islands, light pollution, soil temperature and hydrogeological risk, comparable with the previous year. Alvéole's developers connected their Aura platform to our APIs, which today power their customers' dashboards and reports, and during the year we expanded the APIs' capacity to handle their volumes. We renewed the map layers and, at the end of the season, the bioacoustic data from each sensor is validated before entering the annual reports.

In 2026 the network grew quarter after quarter: new platforms for property owners in Canada and the United States, dozens of new sites mapped, from Toronto to New York, and projects also in Europe. Every new building starts with the same steps: the perimeter, the satellite-calculated maps of the territory and, where needed, a sensor on the roof. For Alvéole it means having the same scientific database in every city, on which to build its services; for us it is proof that a technology born in Italy, among apiaries and parks, holds up at the scale of large North American real estate portfolios.

Urban biodiversity is entering the criteria by which buildings are assessed, and 2026 has shown that it can be measured: a sensor on the roof, a neighborhood map, updated and verifiable indicators, consistent from one building to another. In 2027 we want to bring sensors and maps to many more buildings, together with Alvéole. We thank their entire team for a year of working side by side. XNatura® is a registered trademark in the European Union: sensors, platform, and algorithms are proprietary technology developed by 3Bee. If you manage a real estate portfolio and want to know how much nature really surrounds your buildings, discover the XNatura platform.