Called Hivesite, the invention won the Grassroots Prototype Award and the James and Wells Innovation Award at this year’s Innovation Awards at the Virtual Fieldays.
Starting next month, it will be inserted and tested on 12 hives over the course of the new honey season.
Hivesite was created by Aucklanders James Emslie, Vijay Prema and father and son, Alistair and Gareth Bell.
Alistair is a hobbyist beekeeper, while Gareth works in physics and optics. Prema and Emslie are software and mechanical and electronic engineers respectively.
Gareth Bell, Prema and Emslie have worked together on projects for more than 10 years.
Hivesite started out as a project for detecting the parasitic killer mite in beehives using cameras with AI machine vision.
They soon learned the bigger issue for the beekeeping industry was eradicating the mite from hives altogether.
Emslie said some companies in Europe were using heat to kill the mites while leaving the bees unaffected, but these solutions were highly labour intensive.
They decided to create a system that killed varroa with heat and was simple and robust enough to operate on commercial hives.
They turned to solar panelling to power a heater attached to a plastic tray that fits between the bottom board and heats the brood area of the hive to 39-45 degrees for short periods of time.
The tray heats this part of the hive, killing varroa while leaving the bees unaffected.
“Bees use heat to naturally kill predators, like wasps, and to keep the hive at a certain temperature. They’re good at controlling heat but they don’t do it widely enough to kill the mites,” Prema said.
“We are doing something similar to what the bees normally do but applying it to the brood area where all the juvenile mites are.”
They developed a micro-controller to time the treatment, and use it once every three weeks for two hours.
This coincides with the 21-day time frame for a bee to develop from egg to adult. A foundress (female) varroa mite can create up to seven offspring inside a cell during the three-week incubation period. The heat kills the juvenile mite, which is most vulnerable in the early stages of life.
The tray fits on 10-frame Langstroth hives used by most commercial beekeepers and is compatible with Flow Hives too. The solar panel can also power up to four hives, which brings down the solutions cost per hive.
The bees are also free to move in and out of the hive while the heat treatment is occurring. It focuses on killing the in-brood varroa to break the breeding cycle which otherwise can see rapid population increase of the virus-spreading mites.
“It all fits on a pallet as well so you can pick it up and take it out to the bush,” Bell said.
They are still finetuning Hivesite’s installation on beehives, but ideally, they want it so beekeepers only need to lift off the hive and insert the tray and put the hive back on and set up the solar panel.
Emslie said over the past year, they have already proven that heat kills varroa and the insulating queen excluder which retains the heat in the brood super allows for the bees to transfer into the honey supers without negative impact on honey production.
“But there’s the long-term things that we need to prove out on the site as well as if there are any side benefits such as increasing honey production compared to chemical treatments,” Emslie said.
“We can also treat all the way through the honey flow because there are no pesticide residues. They can be treated throughout the season without interrupting honey flow, we can put the heater in and keep the mites down,” Bell said.
The four have spoken to around 20 beekeepers about Hivesite and, so far, the reaction has been positive.
They also plan to speak to the industry at a New Zealand Beekeepers Inc meeting in Taupo later this month.
Following the pilot, the results will be tested and analysed and if successful, the four will start looking into ways of upscaling Hivesite’s production.
