Victor Croker and Dave Leemhuis were dropping off their daughters at ballet class in Canberra when they struck up a conversation about beekeeping.
What started out as a chance encounter that day 14 years ago ended up leading to the development of a new type of beehive that improves the health of colonies and can increase honey production by a third.
The hives are now proving so popular that 500 are being shipped to the United States each week.
A return to beekeeping
Beekeeping runs in Mr Croker’s family — his grandmother started keeping bees in the 1920s.
“My dad [then] picked it up and I went straight out of school and did professional beekeeping,” he said.
“Beekeeping gets into your blood, I almost think there is a connection with your soul and the bees.”
Mr Croker spent years tending hives around New South Wales from his base at Ulladulla before moving to Canberra, where he worked in IT for a decade.
After their fateful meeting at ballet drop off, Mr Leemhuis – who’d long held an interest in beekeeping and honey production – set about convincing Mr Croker to share in his passion.
“I got him out on the back deck, fed him a few ports and started to talk,” Mr Leemhuis said.
“It didn’t take long, maybe half a bottle, three-quarters, but by the end of it he was locked in.”
“I thought about it for at least five minutes and then said, ‘righto, let’s do it’,” Mr Croker laughed.
The pair established hives as far as Griffith and West Wyalong in the NSW Riverina, and turned Dave’s three-car garage in the north Canberra suburb of Ngunnawal into a honey processing operation.
“The neighbours were wondering what the hell was going on!” Mr Croker laughed.
Redeveloping the hive ‘from the ground up’
The pair started out with 160 hives, the majority of which were traditional wooden Langstroth hives that were designed 172 years ago.
About 90 per cent of the world’s 100 million bee hives are this wooden type.
But they soon ran into problems with Canberra’s extreme temperatures — icy cold winters and scorching summers.
“When you pop the lid in winter and there’s water dripping all over them and there’s mould growing on the wall frames it really hurts, it really hits you and it drags you down,” Mr Croker said.
They set out trying to find a solution and started experimenting with insulated hives.
“Bees actually need a really warm environment to raise brood, around 34, 35 degrees Celsius,” Mr Croker said.
“If we’re putting them in a wooden beehive and expecting them to actually maintain that when it’s cold, then they’ve got to work really hard.
“The bees will assign a percentage of their population to be heater bees and they vibrate their flight muscles to generate a lot of heat.
“But in doing so they have a high metabolic stress, so they have a shorter life span and consume a lot of honey and burn through their stores.”
It led the duo to hire a commercial industrial designer and develop their own hive, using new materials such as a high-density polystyrene inside, to help control the temperature.
“We redeveloped the hive from the ground up, everything from how the entrance works, the ventilation in the floor, how the boxes interlock together,” Mr Croker said.
“If you think about a colony of bees, the way they’ve evolved over millions of years, they live inside large tree cavities, that’s what they go looking for when they’re looking for a new home.
“So, our hive really mimics that.”
Mr Croker said the new design helped produce a third more honey than non-insulated hives.
“The productivity and what we started getting out of the bees, we sort of decided we couldn’t just keep it a secret, we had to make good on it and help other people,” Mr Leemhuis said.
Growing demand and expansion into US market
Their company, HiveIQ, won a Commonwealth grant through the Manufacturing Modernisation Fund and with that, and the help of investors, they built a factory in the north Canberra suburb of Mitchell.
A couple of years ago, they branched out to the United States, setting up a warehouse in Kansas City, in the state of Missouri.
Mr Croker also hit the road last year to sell their product, driving two-and-a-half laps of the US and visiting beekeeping supply shops along the way.
“In the first week we had six new dealers in California alone and it just grew from there,” he said.
By the end of 2023, 55 supply shops were stocking their polystyrene hives and commercial beekeepers were coming onboard too.
“One of the largest queen brooders in California has got a fleet of our hives,” Mr Croker said.
“He said in his wooden hives he lost about 90 per cent of those queens and in the polystyrene hives he only lost about 10 per cent.
“So, the difference was huge.”
Strong sales mean they’re now shipping 500 to 600 hives to the US each week.
New technology to monitor colonies
Mr Croker described beekeeping in Australia as a “dark art” where secrets were handed down within families over generations, but that his company was trying to change that.
Part of that involved introducing new technology within the hive, such as sensors and scales with accompanying software, so keepers could track the temperature, weight and health of their hives.
HiveIQ chief technology officer John Robinson said it was “bringing beekeeping into the 21st century” and helped keepers know if their hive was healthy or in decline.
“What we can do is give you several weeks’ notice that if you don’t do anything with this hive, it will die,” he said.
“But it gives enough time that you can get out to your bees and do some repair work so it can survive into the future.”
Mr Robinson said the technology also saved beekeepers a lot of time by highlighting which hives needed attention.
“Instead of driving out and inspecting 1200-1400 hives, the sensors allow us to look at our portal and we can see there’s four hives in that apiary that need to be looked at, there’s a temperature variation which might indicate there’s a queen problem,” he said.
The new technology will be rolled out in the second half of 2024.
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