The New HiveIQ with Victor Croker (S6, E08)

S6, E08 - The New HiveIQ with Victor Croker

Becky Masterman: This is Becky Masterman from the Minnesota Honey Producers Association. When I'm heading to my bee yard in my red bee truck, I'm listening to Beekeeping Today podcast. Welcome toBeekeeping Today.

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment presented by Betterbee. I'm Jeff Ott.

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

Global Patties: Hey, Jeff and Kim. Today's sponsor is Global Patties. They're a family-operated business that manufactures protein supplement patties for honey bees. It's a good time to think about honey bee nutrition. Feeding your hives protein supplement patties will ensure that they produce strong and healthy colonies by increasing brood production and overall honey flow. Now is a great time to consider what type of patty is right for your area and your honey bees. Global offers a variety of standard patties, as well as custom patties to meet your needs. No matter where you are, Global is ready to serve you out of their manufacturing plants in Airdrie, Alberta, and in Butte, Montana, or from distribution depots across the continent. Visit them today at www.globalpatties.com.

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Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. We know you have only a few minutes a week to spend with a podcast and spending it with us we definitely appreciate. On today's podcast, we talk with third-generation Australian commercial beekeeper Victor Croker. When we caught up with Victor, he was in the States promoting his new EPS, or expanded polystyrene hive system, developed through his experience of over the last 40 years of moving beehives around eastern Australia. His beekeeping business centers on producing over 330,000 pounds of honey and pollination of almonds and other crops each season.

Victor and his beekeeping partners started to experiment with EPS hives for their insulation qualities but quickly found that what was available was not suitable for commercial beekeepers. They set out to design and manufacture hives they could use in their own operation and survives the subjected rigors and abuse hives received daily in the field. Their design quickly became so popular with other beekeepers, they decided to mass-produce the hive and make it available, first in Australia and now in the United States. That was the beginning of HiveIQ.

Stay tuned as we discuss HiveIQ, its design features, future directions, and even the HiveIQ software that they've made with colony and yard management in mind. First, a quick word from our friends at Strong Microbials as they announce a new probiotic pollen patty called SuperFuel.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, their regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. [chuckles] Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show. Sitting across a virtual table right now, and not in Australia, is Victor Croker. He is with HiveIQ with an exciting new product he's launching here in the States that I'm excited about. You know me, I'm the gear geek. Victor, welcome to the show.

Victor Croker: Thank you, Jeff and Kim. It's an honor to be here, actually. I've been done a lot of miles in the US since I arrived here, about the 1st June, actually. I think I've done about 12,000 miles on the road here and a lot of it has been listening to your podcast just to, I guess, educate myself on beekeeping in America. I have to say it's been really awesome to listen to some of your guests and what they've got to contribute to beekeeping, what they're doing for beekeeping.

Kim: Well, excited to meet you, Victor. Thank you for being here with us today and for the compliment. It's always nice to hear when somebody who knows more than we do enjoys what we do.

Jeff: [laughs]

Victor: [chuckles] Thank you. Like I said, it's an honor to be here. Thank you.

Jeff: Well, Victor, I gave a one-sentence introduction to you. You can do a better job. Please, tell us who you are, your background in beekeeping, and why you're here maybe.

Victor: I'm a third-generation commercial beekeeper in Australia. We currently run 1,500 hives. My grandmother was actually the first generation beekeeper. She had about 120 hives in her 20s. It flowed on from there. My dad had 2,500 beehives, which my beekeeping day started when I was at school. Every school holidays period, every chance I got, I'd be in the truck with my dad heading out on the bees. I've got some great memories of and I've got some pretty cool pictures of me when I was about 11-12 or earlier, working in my dad's mobile extracting van in the school holiday period.

Now we run 1,500 hives, my business partner, Dave, and I in Australia. We do a combination of honey production and pollination. We produce about 150,000 kilograms of honey in a season. I think that's probably around 330,000 pounds, something like that. We do a couple of two to three almond-- We do an almond pollination and we do a couple of canola pollinations, but the commercial beekeeping side of our business is really our test bed for-- It's becoming our test bed for technology. We have a new beehive. I guess there was a transition point in--

2010 was a really wet, miserable, cold winter in Australia, and I saw my bees really struggling, and that we had 10-frame Langstroth timber hives. I saw them really struggling, so lots of condensation and lots of mold and really struggling. Bees are one of those things that they have a direct connection with your soul, I think is the best way, when you think about it. When they really, in a bad way, personally, drags you down emotionally . The flip side of that is when they're really doing well, it puts a spring in your step as a beekeeper. When you pop that lead in and the bees are really doing well, makes you feel good. It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't worked bees and been involved in bees.

I said to my business partner, "This is crazy. Our bees are struggling. There's got to be a better way." We started investigating insulated hives and started testing in 2011. You started running about 150 insulated hives that we procured out of Scandinavia, and we were just blown away by what we saw. I think what we discovered was insulation really, really, really matters to bees.

In that first season, we're running them alongside our timber hives, and we produced about 35% more honey out of our polystyrene. High-density polystyrene is the material our hives are made out of. We saw a massive increase in honey production. All the condensation and moldy frames just weren't a thing anymore in those hives. The timber frames, they go dark in color, and that's from the water damage that happens during the winter period, and the frames just get darker and darker.

Kim: Victor, let me interrupt you here for a second, just because I'm not terribly familiar with Australian geography. What part of Australia do you keep your bees? When you say winter, what is your winter like, really, and what part of Australia are you in so that I can get a mental picture here?

Victor: We do our beekeeping in New South Wales. We're migratory so we move around, we move our hives about 8 to 10 times per season. Our climate ranges from -5 to -10 degrees Celsius, which I think is getting down to about 14 Fahrenheit, and that's winter, and depending on where we are. Like I said, we're quite diverse on where we go. Sometimes we're overwintering down on the south coast, which is a different climate, and then other times we're up in the snowy mountains, which is cold, and we'll have like a few inches of snow on top of the lids at times. Then we move out into inland Australia on some of the eucalyptus honey flows, where it gets to 50 degrees Celsius, which I think is getting up around 115, 120 Fahrenheit. We have crazy-- I'm sure we don't get as cold as in the parts of the USA, but we definitely get, I think, as equally as hot. We see extremes on each side. What we see in the cold wet climates is we see condensation and we see the bees really struggling. One thing we noticed, for example, is when we're up in the snowy mountains with our hives, we saw that the timber hives, they didn't have any snow on the lid, and on the polystyrene, the EPS hives, they still had the snow there. What was telling us was the heat loss from the hive was melting the snow on the timber hives. The bees have to replace that heat.

They're amazingly resilient critters, is the word to say. They'll find a way, they all know cluster and they do all sorts of survival mechanisms, but what it does, it consumes all their resources. If you can give a hive, the colony, a warm thermally superior environment, it just frees up resources to do other more productive things. In the summer when we're out in 45 to 50 degrees Celsius heat, the beading on the timber hives is crazy. We've got beading up to the top of the third story sometimes on a big honey flow. Some of our honey flows like river red gum, coolibah, this plant, mallee, these are all eucalyptus species that grow in arid Australia and on some of our rivers, Riverina system. We have massive beading.

Even, in some climates, the hives will melt down. I've had hives on coolibah, where it's been up around 50 degrees where the wax melted in the hive and ran out the front door. That completely destroys the colony as you can understand. What we saw in the polystyrene hives, and it's probably going back seven or eight, nine years ago now-- We've been using insulated hives for 12 years now so we've got quite a lot of experience with what the differences are. Well, we had all our hives on one site with a mix of timber and polystyrene and the EPS hives because they were new at the time and we were still testing. It was early days. We had full boxes of foundations like wooden frame with a plastic insert and the timber hives all had drawn combs. They had a massive head start on this honey flow.

I remember one of the commercial beekeepers dropped in to have a look at our hives for us, just to check them for us, and he reported back and said, "Guys, you're going to have to remove some boxes off your poly hives. They're not going to draw out all that plastic. No chance, not in this climate." We went back 10 days later. The polystyrene hives had fully drawn out and filled up with honey and capped those boxes of foundation. These timber hives hadn't done actually anything. In fact, they'd gone backwards. I think that their population seemed to diminish from that stress. There's been a couple of really decisive observations and turning points in the last 12 years using these different types of hives that made us realize that insulation is critically important for honeybees.

Jeff: It's interesting, at least here in the States, it seems like beekeeping goes through- there's periods of focus. Back when I started in beekeeping, the focus was on the Africanized bees coming up from Mexico and then the tracheal mites, and then it became aarroa. Now the focus is on, while varroa is still there and Tropilaelaps is knocking on the door, but everyone is focused on insulation now. I think insulation is the name of the game at the moment. This is a great opportunity to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.

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Kim: You almost started from the ground up here trying to fix all of the things that weren't working well with the equipment that you had available at the time and you needed something new. I guess the question is, what did you fix and how did you fix the problems that the other equipment had? I'm going to guess that you tried some styrofoam from other companies and you were still using, you call them timber boxes, wooden boxes. You've got those two and then you've got what you did. What's the difference? Why is yours better?

Victor: Thanks, Kim. Because we're commercial, what was available in that insulated hive market just really wasn't optimized for commercial beekeeping. Now, we got it to work because the business case was so strong, but the form factor was one issue that we needed to solve. The way we transport our hives in Australia is we put them on pallets, four hives on a pallet, three pallets wide on the truck. We've got maximum road width rule in Australia of 2.5 meters which I think is about 8'6 in imperial measurement.

With the 10-frame polystyrene hive, because they're about 1.916-inch, so 40 millimeters thick from the walls, we couldn't go six wide, so too wide. We had to fix the form factor problem and so we came up with a nine-frame hive. Most people run nine-frames in their honey supers anyway. The nine-frame was the first thing that we did, is change the form factor.

What we discovered, we thought, some people will say, "Well, we won't get enough brood," because we run single brood boxes. Most commercial beekeepers in Australia run single brood boxes. People are saying, "Well, you won't get enough brood," but what we discovered is that with the insulated hive, the queen lays brood wall to wall. If you think about it, the brood temperature needs to be around 92, I think, degrees Fahrenheit, 35-ish Celsius. That's warm. When they put brood right out near the wall in that such poorly insulated timber, that thin timber walls, they've got to work so hard to get that brood temperature to work and maintain a consistent brood temperature on those outside walls. With the insulated hive, it just wasn't a problem. Bees would just lay in the wall, that bees would raise brood wall to wall and so that problem--

The nine-frame worked out really well, and means we can fit the six wide on the truck. It also works for OH&S, Occupational Health and Safety thing because we've got this thing looming up, back injuries from lifting heavy. Just dropping that one frame out made a difference, but also the fact that our boxes are probably about maybe a quarter of the weight of a timber hive roughly, so we've got that weight advantage. At the moment, we run all deeps. That'll explain what we got, where we are and with mediums and all the others.

Then the ruggedization or ruggedness of the product for commercial beekeeping, we throw it around. Beekeepers throw their hive boxes around, we stand them up, they get loaded off and on trucks. We had to start thinking about how we ruggedize the product. You'll see, Jeff, when you open your [chuckles] hives that you've just been handed, you'll see that we've put a ruggedized edge, top and bottom edge on the hive bodies, and it's both screwed and glued together. That's something we've done to bring the product up to speed in terms of its ruggedness.

The second part, that interlocking design, it's nothing new. A lot of insulated hives use that ninja-locking design, but it's really critical for weather protection. Two things, weather protection. It doesn't matter how hard that rain is driving in on the side of the hive, the water can't ingress into the hives. Whereas on a normal timber hive, it's just a flat surface so the water is driving in and it'll push water into the hive. As you know, most of the time moisture is an enemy of a colony of hive, too much moisture.

The other thing is pest protection. With the polystyrene, it's a softer product. It's slightly softer than timber. We have a really hard compound. It's ultra-high density, we'd call it, so it is tough, but because it's warm bugs like to, if there's any little crack between the boxes, they'll lay eggs. Ants will lay eggs in there. That edge that we put on that hive fixes that problem as well. We fixed a few problems there.

The entrance, you start from the ground floor. We've got rails underneath the hive standard so that you can slide things like a sticky board. We've got pollen collector receptacle. We've got an optional pollen collector system which we developed, which integrates. We can talk about that a bit later if we've got time. Underneath the hive, we designed it to take different things, different options, I guess. At the entrance, it's a three-stage entrance that we've developed. We discovered and, yes, researched. We did a lot of just reviews of other research out there that bees don't particularly like a large entrance. There's some thinking out there that the entrance, that you need it wide open, all the full width of the hive to get maximum honey production, but we've discovered that's actually not really the case.

We've discovered that you only need quite a small entrance for the bees and ours is about, imperial, each section is about3 inches I guess. It's a hinge system. We designed the entrance to be in three stages so the beekeeper can have one-third, two-thirds, or three-thirds open and closed. Then we designed it so that when it is open, it's flat because we discovered that some of these funky entrance designs have a loop, have a lip that the bees need to climb over. We've discovered, see dead bees and chalkbrood and things building up behind the entrance because the bees are struggling to get debris out of the hive.

One thing I like about the EPS hive is how hygienic it is. I think that's part one of the contributing factors in seeing such a reduction in disease rates in the hive. Having it so the bees can just drag out that debris, chalkbrood, and so forth as it occurs rather than have it building up and becoming a hygiene problem has been important. It's a ventilated hive.

Jeff: You had referred to the hive that I've been looking at and just for our listeners, a friend of mine, a local beekeeper, Paul, came by last night and he just so happened says, "Look at what I just got at the local bee store." He pulled this big box out of his truck and it says HiveIQ. I said, "Oh, my gosh, I'm talking to Victor Croker tomorrow about his hive." He says, "Well, here you can keep it overnight and take a look at it so you can understand what this is and you can be a more informed podcaster." I said, "Oh, gee, thanks, Paul."

As I started pulling it apart and looking at it, my ignorance here, I've not handled EPS or styrofoam hive before. My idea of a styrofoam hive was, essentially, a beer cooler on the beach. As a beekeeper, I know how equipment gets tossed and moved about, and never really investigated it but this, I am really impressed. You're talking about it's compressed and condensed. It feels like a board.

Victor: Yes, right. It's pre-expanded first and then it's stored in silos for a period just of age and then it's injected under high pressure into the molds. That whole process is a tricky recipe that we've had to get right to get the density correct because what bees do with standard polystyrene is they excavate it. In a natural environment, when bees go into a hollow log, the first thing they do is start to excavate out all the soft material and they're looking to find that hard surface where they'll propolis, create that Propolis so it's important that the density is super high. It's very rare, not many products in EPS are molded in this ultra-high density. Bicycle helmets, maybe another example, you have quite high, but even then I don't think it's high.

It's really important that it's high density so that the bees don't have that natural instinct to excavate and start turning it into white powder, [laughs] which they'll do to a fruit box.

I've seen beekeepers catching a swarm in a broccoli box or a fruit box or something as a temporary thing and left them in there a few days and then coming back to find the box turned into a white powder. That's one of the key things. Obviously, for strength. They take screws really well. You'll notice how it all goes together. It's screwed and glued, but that high-density foam takes the screws really nicely. You get a strong grip on that.

Jeff: I'm not sure if Paul will get his hive back, but I am intrigued by, you said, the interlocking design of the super. How is that in terms of prying apart with a hive tool?

Victor: We developed our own hive tool, but if you don't have one of ours, it's coming soon, you can just use a J hook hive tool and it probably should do it. We've been using this type of hive for 12 years so we've got a pretty well down pat. We find J hook and that little step out at the front of the hive tool, you press it in sideways and leverage down and it works a treat. You just need that little step. That's the important part of the hive tool for working our hives. You press it until you hit the step up and leverage down. Really hard to describe verbally but do a video, I think, is probably the best way.

Jeff: Do the bees propolise between the supers on the interlocking?

Victor: No, we don't see that at all. No, we don't have a propolis issue on the inside on those joins at all in our hives. One thing we've really focused on is bee space in the design. I think one of the good things about this material is it's very stable. Unlike timber, which can move over time and change buckle and warp and then the bee spaces can be all over the shop a little bit. I've noticed in some timber hives you get quite a large variance in bee space and then once that bee space goes past a certain point, they start to build unnecessary comb in proper ways.

Jeff: One of the first articles Kim ever had me write years and years ago was on the dimensions of all the Bee equipment that's available. That was my first exposure to how variable the Bee space is from one manufacturer to another and why I tend to want to always keep with one manufacturer because their equipment is theoretically designed to work with one another maintaining the Bee space, especially between supers. Where does your hive maintain the Bee space on the frames? Is it above the frame or below the frame or is it a difference between the top of the frame and the bottom of the frame?

Victor: Top of the frame, the top bar sits a tiny bit below the top edge of the box and our queenie suite sits in there if you're at the queen brood level. We end up with the perfect bee space between when you put the next super on between the top bar and the bottom bar of the frame on the two supers, end up with the perfect bee space there, which is critical on the ends of the frames as well, the walls and the end bars of the frames. That space is critical. I've seen them build wax in there when the frames are either too short or the box is built to just out of whack in terms of size.

Kim: I think, Victor, I interrupt you for a second, just question. It's a good question. Is the bee space maintained below the bottom bars and so the top bars and the box below it comes exactly flush with the top of that box so that you're getting a frame that hangs shorter in the box?

Victor: Yes.

Kim: I'm not going to say a big problem, but it's a common problem here, is my frames from this company don't fret the boxes I got from the other company because some of the frames are touching the top bars down below and some of them have a space of above on both ways so you got a triple-double or double or triple. Your frames are made for your boxes. Can I just go out and buy a frame that's going to fit your box if I wanted?

Victor: Yes. Now, we don't make frames. We leave that to the experts on frames. Yes, any Langstroth frame. One thing I noticed in frames is there is a variance from different manufacturers. I'm very fussy when I select my frames [chuckles] but some of them screw up the dimensions by, I've seen it, by 3 millimeters short on the inbars, and I'm seeing 3 millimeters too low in height and that's not a good scenario because then you end up with excess combs. If your standard lengths for a frame was built, proper standard, it will fit into your hive and the bee space will be maintained correctly.

Jeff: Yes, beekeepers will blame the poor bees for filling the space with-- "My bees build comb everywhere. Darn bees," and that's really the differences in manufacturer. My eyes were open when I wrote that article.

Victor: Just to finish on the propilisation thing, originally, we started, we were painting the inside of the EPS boxes, the ones we got from Scandinavia. We stopped painting them because we discovered that the bees actually propolise paint the inside of the EPS. EPS has got like a grain to it, like a round granule, you'll see it, but ours is quite fine because it's really high density. It's so fine it's barely visible. The bees fill it in and smooth it right out so they polish it so the inside of the hive becomes painted with propolis suds. For us, that's a really good outcome. Propolis has good antimicrobial properties and so forth. It creates a healthy environment for the bees and bugs struggle to live in it if at all. Whereas, in the old timber hives we had you get cracks in the timber, and bugs and pathogens can live in the grains of the timber.

Kim: Victor, how am I going to feed this hive?

Victor: There's a few different options. We've got a dual-purpose hive top feeder that's coming this spring. We're currently tooling up for. It's liquid and solid feeders. I think you should see-- I think it might be on our website, in our brochure actually. We've got a brochure there on the website. You'll see future products coming. It holds about 8 liters of, what's that imperial, that's probably, nearly 2 gallons maybe of liquid.

Kim: That feeder's going to sit directly on top of the top super. The cover that you have goes on top of the feeder so the bees have access from everywhere in the box below it, so there's no restriction, there's no--

Victor: Yes.

Kim: The cover fits on top of your feeder then, right?

Victor: Yes. The same interlocking design. The feeder has the same interlocking design, so it locks onto the hive. With our feeder, we designed it because we've tried so many different feeders, we found that in winter when it gets colder anyway, the bees struggle to actually get to the feeder because they struggle to break the cluster in a non-insulated hive. The feed is insulated. It's molded out of, it's the same material, it's high density, so it's insulated. The material, the liquid inside the feeder tends to stay a little bit warmer than a traditional timber feeder, which is not insulated.

The bees take a lot longer to cluster. It takes a lot, in colder temperatures, for bees to cluster in an insulated hive so they'll still access feed for a lot longer into the cooler months than our timber hives. They go up and we put it right above the center of the hive. We call it, it's like a volcano, [laughs] and the bees go up from the center. In the center, there is a cavity where you can drop your pollen patty or your pollen mash. We see a mash and we'll get a protein or a pollen mix, mix up a mash and we carry it in a sealed 4-gallon bucket and then we'll just grab a handful of it and drop it in the center so the bees can access their solid food and then they can continue up over the edge and down into the liquid food out through that same access point and access the liquid.

What it means is we can-- It was always a buggerance to try and lift the feeder off, put pollen patty in and you'd spill the liquid in trying to do it. It's pretty heavy when it's full of liquid. Now, we just have to pop a little clear cover off, a polycarbonate cover, drop the mash in, pop the lid back on. You don't have to disturb the hive and we can do both solid protein type feeding and liquid in the one feeder. There's other options. The Boardman feeder, frame feeders, and they take all the other feeders the standard Langstroth would take.

Jeff: Does this accept standard honey supers then? It's designed so you can put a standard medium or a deep on the brood chamber?

Victor: You mean like a timber, wooden. What do you call it wooden or timber? Not right. It's not pretty because our wall thickness is 1.916, I think so. That's fully 40 millimeters. The width is similar. We made our box. Our boxes turned out to be about the same with this 10-frame Langstroth timber hive, Australian version. I've noticed yours is a little bit wider actually than the Australian 10-frame. You've got quite a lot of space in your 10-frame.

Jeff: It might depend on the manufacturer, too, just a little bit.

Victor: Possibly, yes. It's really difficult to get that gap to cover or to cover the gap and have no gap. It's not really an ideal scenario but I have had beekeepers in Australia using their 10-frame boxes on top and even, I think, 8-frame boxes on top or below. Sometimes, actually, we've had a transition. I've seen beekeepers come along, put the polystyrene box on top, let the bees come up and start laying brood and then lift it off. It's part of their transition strategy but it defeats the purpose of the insulation if you put a timber hive on our hive. You may as well not because heat rises and obviously, so it goes out the top.

Kim: It sounds like, I'm going to be honest listening to all of this, all of the attributes, which you've included in the design and functionality of this. You've taken all of the good aspects of a hollow tree that bees would nest in and I don't have to have the rest of the tree to go with it.

[laughter]

Kim: The cavity is about the right size. You've got the insulation. What is the R factor of your insulated hive, by the way?

Victor: Actually, we haven't had it lab tested but it's, doing the math, it's six to eight times more insulated than a traditional timber hive. In winter, it's even more because what happens with timber is it absorbs moisture and the more moisture in the timber the less insulated it is, so you actually get- and our lid is solid foam. We've put a lot into our hive top. because we weren't happy with-- There was issues with the EPS links that would buckle when you put a heavy strap on them. When we'd strap them down on trucks, for example, when we've got 2,500-kilogram or 5,000-pound straps and we're really ratcheting down so they stay on the truck and don't fall off. That tends to buckle the lids. Then they didn't have hive tool protections so when you're popping the lid off, you're always cutting into the EPS.

We fixed all those problems and then on the top of the lid we designed a pressed metal cover, which is adhered onto the EPS right across and that's part of the rugged. That's a really important ruggedization feature. I don't know if ruggedization is a word [chuckles] but it ruggedizes the product for commercial beekeepers. It works great for hobbyists. It's something that's a cool thing about our hive, I think, is the hobbyists love it because it also works for them in that sense.

The other thing I mentioned too is we noticed when we started because we're migratory beekeeping and there's a lot of thinking out there that it's really harsh on the bees, migratory bee, and I tend to agree. When we're moving bees for vast distances on semi-trucks the vibrations of the road and just the shock, it's a constant shock for hours upon hours on this. I believe we're losing a lot of bees through stress and we're probably shortening their lifespan and decreasing health.

What we discovered is when you transport hives in the EPS they don't get anywhere near as distressed. We noticed it because we were traveling on these pretty rough roads with our timber and our EPS hives on the trailer together, then we saw that the bees and the timber hives were so stressed and flustered and they were beading at the front of the hives and the EPS hives, which were equal colony strengths they were indoors. They didn't bother coming out to have a look. [laughs]

We discovered that transporting EPS hive, I think, there's some research we should be doing to understand how many bees we actually lose, how it affects the population when we transport bees across vast distances.

Kim: Queen lives, once you take those hives off the back of a truck you've got some percentage of queen lives that you can count on every time. I'm guessing you've fixed that also.

Victor: Yes, look, our queen success rates, we changed the way. We evolved our beekeeping over the last 10 to 15 years as well. The way we do queens, back in the day we used to just go through and do blanket requeening and all that thing, but, now, we've changed our attitude completely. We carry a queen bank during the season when we're working our hives and we also have our nucs at each apiary. We just fix the queens we're unhappy with now rather than just doing blanket requeening. It used to hurt my soul when I squashed a queen that was performing beautifully just because it was supposedly too old.

Our attitude now with our EPS hives we find that we only need to be on [unintelligible]. We run 120 hives in an apiary. We've got 12 apiaries, production apiaries. We find that when we go there, we might replace five to six queens each visit. We come into winter, we find overwintering rates in the EPS hives, we're up 97%, 98% success rate. We don't have varroa mite. I'm going to qualify that. Actually, I was having dinner last night with a beekeeper here in Kansas City and he said back in the day before varroa mite beekeepers were bee herders. I don't know if you guys know that saying before, whereas, now, you actually have to be a beekeeper. [laughs]

Jeff: There's a lot more management involved post-varroa.

Kim: When I go your web page, Victor, it's HiveIQ, and immediately I'm looking at something and I'm wondering-- I don't know. This is the world of fancy electronics and communication and cell phones and everything that can be done electronically has been done by somebody in a beehive. I'm guessing that you've followed that trail also. Do you have some of that equipment that you're using or that can be used in your hives?

Victor: Yes, absolutely. Beekeeping has become a complex business and back in the day, when we were bee herders, we could just put rocks on the lid, where we, "Okay, this one needs some help, so, let's put two rocks on this one, and that one, one rock on that," or we would write on the lids.

Jeff: You've seen Kim's hives, haven't you?

[laughter]

Victor: Yes. You would have seen mine a few years ago, writing all over lids, and, obviously, that data, valuable data, I believe. Every time we'd visit our hives we'd do things to our hives that if we don't log it, we're missing an opportunity to collect valuable data. I guess, it's agri-tech for beekeeping and like I said, beekeeping is complex business and if you think about there's so many moving parts in a beekeeping business. First of all, I think that the hierarchy of beekeeping starts with the bee sites and your territory. If you don't have that, you're not a beekeeper. If you don't have a block of land to build a house, you can't have a house, sort of thing, similar to that.

It starts with the flora and your territory and your sites. In Australia there's 800 species of eucalyptus trees, I believe, and there's about 200 species of Leptospermum, which is manuka honey and they all have different attributes, different flowering and budding periods. They're affected differently by different weather. Some flower every year, some flower every three, four, five years, some only flower when they get certain rainfall. All this knowledge you have to have. That's why a beekeeper, I think, in Australia is multigeneration and we take it for granted when we get this knowledge passed down for generations.

Then at the apiary level or migratory, we've got to cross borders now. We've got border security. By security considerations, we're to create a whole bunch of documentation to get across borders. I'm not sure if it's like that here in the US, but in Australia, we just moved our bees across into Victoria and there was a mountain of work we had to do. All our queen and our genetics management, et cetera, et cetera. What we've developed is an enterprise software. What we didn't want to do is just create an app, a hive diary that you can download off the App Store and just plug in.

We wanted an enterprise-grade architecture that could grow and evolve but would be modular, so high availability, multitenancy, and all the things, so I guess similar to your financial management system that you would manage your business with. It's very complex. It's got a lot of complex requirements and it becomes very important for your business as if I went tomorrow and said we're going to switch off the development of this platform and take the financial system away, you would probably [laughs] scream. I think beekeeping, that's the thinking behind our system, is that we've got a enterprise-grade system that covers off the hierarchy. It's built around the hierarchy of beekeeping.

Sites, apiaries, then hives, it's object and event-based software. It tracks the status of all of the different levels of the hierarchy, of sites, apiaries, hives. It tracks all of the tasks and activities that we do. We log from harvesting, requeening, disease inspections and management. Relocation, so moving bees around the different sites, all that is tracked. Weather integration is really important. For example, rainfall and temperatures. Humidity have a huge play in the success of beekeeping. Yes, we've built this software. It's in Beeta at the moment. We call it B-E-E-T-A, to be released.

Kim: I thought that was a typo. Now I understand it. .

[laughter]

Victor: There we go. We've got, I don't know, a few thousand Beeta users and providing us with feedback. I think we're going to keep Beeta running until around the end of the year just getting that valuable-- Building a software for beekeeping's not easy because beekeepers all do things differently too, so they don't all do it the same way. That's something we've had to really put a lot of design into the workflow of beekeeping and making sure that when one of our users says, "Hey, I do with my inspections a bit different and this is what I want," we can easily adopt a software to that.

Then as you mentioned, Kim, the technology, so we've got load cells, or we'd want to call them scales, weight scales integrated into our hive that's in Beeta and we'll have that available in the market early next year, so around February next year. We will have that at the Hive Life Conference. We're planning on coming to the Hive Life Conference.

We've got our sensors in the hive like humidity, temperature. We've got a data frame that we're using for research. We've partnered up with Macquarie University in Sydney and they use our frame, which has got 21 sensors on the frame, all the way around it and in the middle. Because when you put a sensor in a beehive, understanding the thermal conditions in the hive is more than one sensor. Just putting it in one doesn't give you the full picture of what the bees are doing in terms of their thermal management. That's our data frame.

Then we have power. We've got a sheet metal, well, lightweight, strong, precise, precision, I guess, manufactured pallet system that we use for transporting hives. It's got fold-out legs. You'll see that on our website. That's really important for the migratory beekeepers but we've also got one for the stationary ones which is a two-hive stand. In that stand, we've designed it for future proofing, so it'll take the power system, lithium-ion battery and power module with solar charging. The goal is to make it zero-touch. We put the technology out in the field, power's taken care of, and the data transfer and all that sort of stuff is taken care of for the beekeeper, and it injects it into our software.

Our software is very granular in terms of the way you use it, so you can use it just as a hobbyist and just do the simple things that a hobbyist does. In fact, when you boil it down, the difference between a hobbyist and commercial, there's not a lot of activities that they do different. You still have disease management, harvesting, requeening, swarm management, all that stuff. Probably migration is one of the things that hobbyists don't tend to do, very rarely if ever. There's really not that many things, so our software, I think scales nicely down to hobbyists, but it can handle large enterprises with 50,000 plus hives with ease.

Kim: Obviously, you've spent many years developing this and we cannot do it justice in the time we have in the podcast. I would love to have you back at a later time you talking about other things in Beeta. Maybe if you're back in the States for the Hive Life, maybe we can talk to you then and talk about what's latest and greatest. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have. I'm going to go down and check out Paul's hive here in a little bit further because personally, I think it's well thought out. Where can people find this in the States?

Victor: Yes, and that's the purpose of my visit at the moment, like I said, I started in Orange County, headed north, and made my way around. I think I've done around 12,000 miles in the Hertz hire-car. I think they were a bit shocked when I handed it back in New York, JFK Airport-

[laughter]

Victor: -but I'm visiting bee shops and meeting some amazing beekeeping supply shops that are really the crux of beekeeping here for the hobbyist, especially, as they provide amazing support for the beekeeping community here. That's the type of people we like to work with that are here for the beekeepers. I'm visiting the bee shops, demonstrating our hive, and getting them to consider becoming dealers, I guess. I think dealer is the word we use here. We call it reselling.

So far as your friend would've collected the hive from one of our newly established dealers, we have a warehouse here in the USA in Kansas City where our product lands, and then we distribute out from here. We've got the shipping side of it under control, the distribution under control, but we really want to support that beekeeping supply shop dealer layer because of the great support they give to beekeepers.

For large commercials in Australia, there's more and more commercial beekeepers that have moved over to this style of jive and I'm hoping we might see beekeepers here in the USA, we'll see the business case like business. I think the business case is really strong for commercial, more honey production, lower colony loss, better treatment, better bee health during transport, the list goes on. We're manufacturing the product in Australia. A lot of people, I've seen Facebook posted, "Where is it made?" It's made in Australia at the moment, but I think we would like to make it in America. Obviously, that requires a certain trajectory of volume and so forth.

That's we're at at the time. The next page of my trip, I've extended my trip until the 6th of August and I'm going to continue on the road. If there's anyone out there that would like me to drop in on their bee shop or large commercial beekeeper that wants me to drop by and bring some hives in for an inspection, that's what I'm about for the next five weeks, so I'm looking forward to it. Then I'm back in September. We're at Apimondia in the early September. I'm planning on then hopping back to here USA and doing as many of the beekeeping conferences that you have here, just come along and learn, maybe exhibit our products if we're welcome in those conferences and try to meet as many of the commercial beekeepers as we can here in the USA.

Kim: I'm worn out just listening to your schedule here, Victor. I'm glad I don't have to tag along. I'm going to bet that you have on your webpage either lists of people who have this in the States or links to people who have this, something that if I'm living in Northeast Ohio, I can go someplace, click, and you'll say, "Yes, you've got one over in Western Pennsylvania," or whatever. For folks listening, check out the webpage, certainly.

Victor: Yes. That's on hiveiq.com. Under support, you'll see our dealer on map and if your State hasn't got a dealer that means we haven't got there yet. [crosstalk]

Kim: Okay.

[laughter]

Victor: If you're in any of those States, please reach out.

Kim: I like that confidence. That's good.

Victor: Please reach out to me. It's been a humbling experience just meeting so many of these great folk and they've been very positive about our product, which has been overwhelmingly good [chuckles] for us. Kim, one thing I do have an opening for is a driver, so if you're interested, I'm struggling to do the driving and the meetings and then at night in my hotel room do all the emails, so if you want to get out and about, I need someone to come drive my car.

Kim: That's great. You drive on the wrong side of the road in Australia, don't you?

[laughter]

Victor: Yes. I've had to get my head around driving on the other side, which is no problem. Probably a final thing is on the-- We've got two websites, the US websites.com and the Australian websites.com.au. If you want to have a look at some of the new products that are coming to the US but assumed they're not there, you can have a look at the .com.au website, you'll see products that are soon to be available here in the US, our hive stands, our pollen collection system, I think we're pretty proud of. People love it when I demo. I've got some on board, so if anyone, we can show them.

Integrated pollen collection, what we discovered is people becoming more and more aware that pollen is great for your health. You can put it in smoothies and on your breakfast cereal and so having a pollen collection system integrated in your hive has become a good thing. Also, you can collect pollen during the good times and store it, and have it available to feedback. The pollen collectors, I'm trying to think what else is coming, mediums. Mediums, you call them your supers. We've ordered our tools so the toolings being made, because we learn at Hive Life in January that we really need a medium. You guys, you work so the mediums are coming. I'll be here for this coming spring. Hopefully, Hive Life conference will have them available. We also have a shallow which you guys don't. The shallow will be available from the first September but it's not something that I see much.

Jeff: Yes, the comb producers typically use the shallows. Well, Victor, it's been wonderful having you on the show and I look forward to having you back. Good luck on your North America tour. The local bee shops are all fun places to hang out and I'm sure you'll be well received, continued to be well received.

Victor: Absolutely, I haven't had any issues at all. It's just always been positive. Great experience. I appreciate it.

[music]

Jeff: Kim will get back to you about driving for you.

[laughter]

Victor: All Right, take care.

Kim: Thank you, Victor. This has been fun.

Victor: Thank you.

Jeff: It was really coincidental that Paul stopped by with that hive last night and after talking to Victor and after handling the hive downstairs in the garage, I think he's really onto something.

Kim: Well, I do too. Like I said, he's reinvented the hollow tree in a lot of ways but do me a favor. Take a bunch of pictures, and let's see how this thing looks with all of the stuff that it has. I've looked at pictures on the webpage, but they show you with it all put together, show me the pieces. I'm waiting to get in touch with him again. He'll be back in the spring and he's got my interest.

Jeff: That's really cool. I look forward to looking at it a little bit further. That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and especially Better Bee for their longtime support of this podcast. Thanks to Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you the Beekeeping Today podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions or comments at leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[music]

[00:52:45] [END OF AUDIO]