Kitchener group on protecting beehives and predicting climate change

Helping bees be the best they can be.

Local researchers have developed a product to protect bees and their hives

“We study honeybees and bumblebees,” said Erica Shelley, the CEO and founder of Best for Bees in Kitchener. “Our job is to make life easier for beekeepers, to improve the health of bees, and overall in the long term, we hope to help with prediction of climate change, placement of crops and education and understanding of honeybee and bumblebee biology.”

In 2020, Best for Bees worked with Dr. Peter Kevan at the University of Guelph. That collaboration resulted in the invention of ProtectaBEE, what they call a “hive entrance used for bee vectoring.”

Bee vectoring is when the insects pick up a powder and then distribute it as they collect pollen and nectar.

“Dr. Kevan’s idea was to take that bee vectoring and to allow bees to vector products into the hive to deal with pests inside the hive,” explained Shelley.

One of the biggest issues is varroa mites, a parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honeybees.

“What we found is that what we were using for bee vectoring also worked for keeping out wasps, hornets and robbing bees from the hive as well,” Shelley added.

Best for Bees came up with a plan but had to create the right method for delivery.

ProtectaBEE was developed by Best of Bees in collaboration with the University of Guelph.

“The issue was developing some hardware that would allow those bees to carry those powders into the hive, because bees usually want to carry stuff out of the hive that’s foreign, so we had to trick them,” Shelley said.

Best of Bee also points to the wide-reaching impact of their work.

“We’ve now started developing a multitude of products to help beekeepers and to help bees,” said Shelley. “Even bigger, we’ve started to realize the implications of the information that we could take in will actually predict climate change around the world. And we might be able to look at how long winters might be, we can actually determine where pesticides are a problem, and also where we’re able to plant crops with the highest rate of success.”