Precision Beekeeping with Nectar Technologies' Max Cherney & Nico Coallier (S6, E03)

S6, E03 - Precision Beekeeping with Nectar Technologies' Max Cherney & Nico Coallier

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

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Hey, everybody. Thanks again for joining. Before we get going, I want to ask you for your help. You can help us open a show by sending us an opening greeting like you've heard other guests say in previous episodes. It's really easy to do. Simply record yourself or a group welcoming fellow beekeepers to the podcast and email it to us. It's easy and it really is fun to do. Really.

I hope everyone out there is enjoying a great Fourth of July weekend celebration. Well, I can tell you, my bees aren't enjoying it, or if they're enjoying it, they're enjoying it because they're working so hard. The weight gains in the last several days and the last week have been amazing. It really just brings back the excitement and joy every year I've been doing this and it's fun to see. I hope you're getting to enjoy that as well.

Today, we talk with Max Cherney and Nico Coallier from Nectar Technologies about their solution to assist large scale and commercial beekeepers keep track of their hives and yards scattered across the countryside. You know how much I enjoy technology in a bee yard, so let's get right to the studio and with Max and Rico. First, a quick word from our friends at Strong Microbials.

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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.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting across from us right now is Max Cherney and Nico Coallier. I'm sorry, folks, you know me, I'm terrible with names. Unless it's O-T-T, I have a hard time with names. Anyways, Max and Nico, welcome to the show, Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Max Cherney: It's great to be back. Nice to see you.

Jeff: Max and Nico are with Nectar Technologies. Folks, if you may recall, we had Max back on our show in August of 2021, I believe, and he introduced us to Nectar Technologies. For a listener who may not have heard that show, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Nectar Technologies?

Max: I'm Max. I'm the Chief Operating Officer, the COO at Nectar Technologies. We are a technology company in the beekeeping industry, and we provide our product called BeeTrack, which is a digital asset management tool for commercial beekeepers to digitize their operations and bit by bit make best use of their data. Two years ago, that was with Rae Olsson from WSU. That was our first year of being in market. Now is year three. Like any other technology company, that gives us a lot of time to work out our kinks, figure out how we can help our clients, our commercial beekeepers.

It also gives us time to build a meaningful data set where we can really start to build even more impactful solutions for our clients. That's part of why I'm here with our principal data scientist, Nico, because I think beekeepers, at the end of the day, are probably most interested in looking towards technology to really understand, what's going on with my bees? To do that, you really got to get into the data.

Jeff: Nico, welcome.

Nico Coallier: Thank you. I can take maybe two, three minutes to introduce my background. I come from an atypical background. I started with the stint in the food, from the seed to the kitchen. I actually started in the kitchen in my career to transition towards biology after, where I did a bachelor and then went and mastered in ecology, where I got particularly interested into population dynamics, so how population grow and travel across space and time, basically. After that, I don't know, the academics for me was-- It's not for everyone. For me, I needed more concrete in the day-to-day impact. I started a first business which has nothing to do with beekeeping, but you'll see how everything makes sense at the end. It was about mushrooms and growing mushrooms, and got some skills into AI. Always have been good in math, programmation, a bit of a hacker when I was younger. Got into the AI world and then quickly climbed up the step to start another business in AI where I apply biology.

Then finally, I started working at Unity Technology, which is just a tech where I really gained couple steps of seniority in terms of data science. I was feeling like I was-- I studied ecology to change the world, and then I'm doing stuff that has nothing to do with it. I contacted Nectar to do some volunteer work with them because I had already eight beehive six years ago. I wanted to explore that and really got seduced by what these guys were doing. I joined the team and now I have 150 hive where I use BeeTrack, our product, in it. I also lead the development of the AI feature at Nectar, so it's a beautiful combo.

Jeff: The core of the technology is-- I'm sure there's all sorts of jokes internally about your digital asset management software, your DAM software. You've never heard that before, I know. It is important for beekeepers, and we're not talking about backyard beekeepers, we're talking about beekeepers who have hundreds and thousands of hives that they have to keep track of, and yards, and trucks, and pallets, et cetra.

Max: Yes, that's pretty much it. We've spoken with beekeepers who have accidentally left a yard and just completely forgotten it after moving on from one state to the next through their migratory pollination. There goes 600 hives times-- Hives are worth about $500 a pop right now.

That unto itself, it can be a problem, but that, hopefully, for most beekeepers, is a relatively rare occurrence. Simply knowing where are my hives, how many alive hives do I have, how many alive nukes do I have? If I've promised to sell nukes, which yard should I be going to to pick up the nukes, depending on the strength of the nukes, if I have an order, which job was completed? Am I ready to move on to the next round of jobs as I move from east to west in my operation? Did I miss a yard? Very simple things that if you were maybe working on a handful of hives, that information might live in your brain, might live in a term that we call rockology, rocks and stuff on top of lids, rocks, bricks, and whatnot. As you scale up and as you manage large teams across vast regions, that information becomes increasingly difficult to maintain at a high quality.

Jeff: What are you finding as the breaking point or the point at which the beekeeper finds that he or she needs to move to a digital asset management software beyond the brick, beyond an Excel spreadsheet? At what point should they start looking at that?

Max: I'd say there's two key points. Firstly, it would be, am I in the yard, right? If you are that manager who is in the yard with your team or alone working the bees at every visit, that might mean you're not necessarily requiring all of the tools of a digital asset management system. I think Nico, who is operating just 150 hives, would actually argue contrary to that and say it doesn't matter the size, data is data. Then I would say, do you move hives? You're not going to meet-- I have not yet met a commercial migratory pollination services provider who is able to look at a hive and say, "I know exactly where this hive was three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago." Thus, any data they may have collected at the time, whether it was on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet, a rock on top of the lid, a brick, tracing the activity, the status, the observation from that period three, six, nine months ago, or longer, to now, is impossible.

I would say any movement, and am I, as a manager, in the yard? That's for the answering your question of digital asset management. I think that's what BeeTrack offers. Nectar will be pushing quite a bit beyond digital asset management in terms of value that we deliver to beekeepers, and Nico's already seen that in his 150 hive operation. I think that's where size and type of beekeeping really doesn't matter because good information is good information. If it's organized in a high-quality way, in a standardized way, it can lead to better beekeeping.

Nico: I think if you allow me to add on that, I think there's an element that is not said directly, but it's a given from what Max said. It's the perennity, the fact that when you use rock and crayon or even pen and paper, it's really hard to keep an history of what you did. The gain for any size of beekeeper is that if I have an history of what I did, I can learn other things from it, and machine could also learn another thing from it.

Even without any machine learning or AI, just a human behind a screen looking at the data, you can already see some pattern, for example, that you use different type of treatment, supplement. Let's say you have 20 hive and you've been doing that for five years. Suddenly you never really challenge anything about some supplement you're using or some treatment you're using. You just assume it works for you. We know, beekeeper, that nothing works for everyone. You need to adapt things to your need and having that feedback loop in the data. Seeing how what you did resulted in different outcome or result, it's useful for even a person with 10 hives or 20 hives in my opinion.

Jeff: There's a difference between collecting data for data's sake. I've been accused of being a data nerd. I collect it for my bees, I collect it for my cycling, I collect it for everything it seems about, but then having all that data and making meaningful decisions based on that data, and that's the trick. That's the key I think. What does your software do? What's the value add for the data that you're collecting for the beekeeper?

Max: I think in simple terms, we're not going to make the decision for you. We are not necessarily going to give a black and white response, but we are going to present the data to you in a regular basis that asks you and pushes you to ask the right questions and make sure that you have the right data. There's two sides of my response. One is a question of actually how high quality is the data, and then the other is how to use that information. Whether it's bricks on lids or spreadsheets that are filled out via paper reports that were brought back to the shop, what we're seeing is that quality of data itself can be improved. If the quality is not high enough, bad decisions can be taken just off poor data. With BeeTrack, with our mobile application, we work through strong product design and learning with our beekeepers to ensure that the highest quality information, the right information is being entered.

Now to the question of recommendations. I'll give the example of low-touch beekeeping. Part of the inspiration for talking again is, we have been talking about low-touch beekeeping with Miller Honey Farms, their concept, for a few years now. John was on Beekeeping Today was a great episode, and he evangelized the benefits of low-touch beekeeping. On our end, we're seeing that in the data. We're seeing that across the board and perhaps Nico can talk more to the actual data that we're seeing, that low-touch beekeeping, it works. Moving your hives, it does affect their health. While this is generally understood by beekeepers, I think most migratory commercial beekeepers know that movement causes stress, actually quantifying that stress might help them prioritize the importance of maybe trying to fix this in their operation. One way that we do that not directly through the data science approach, but more through strong product building, is we put a metric on their login page in our manager's portal that just shows how much they've been moving hives, their average hive movement. We also show that per yard. We're actually trying to get beekeepers thinking not just about the fact that movement has an effect on health, but actually, on a regular basis, seeing those numbers, we're not going to be able to get them, or we're not asking beekeepers-- we don't have the solution for them to just change their complete business model, right?

Pollination services fuels the agricultural system of North America and beyond. We need to move bees. That's a given. We're not going to say, "Hey, beekeeper, we're seeing higher movement leads to higher mortality." We are going to say, "We're seeing that. Is there one movement you can get rid of in the next year? Is there one holding yard that you can skip through changes to your logistics? Can we work that out together and consider that?"

Just having listened to John Miller on Beekeeping Today, that wasn't something that they implemented overnight. It was through a period of years that they worked on logistical changes to make it possible to get to the point where they greatly reduced their quantity of touches.

I think getting beekeepers working with their data on a regular basis, training them on quality data, and over time we work toward better beekeeping. Nico, I'm sure you want to add something to that.

Nico: Yes. i don't want to add too much, but I think there may be couple points is-- The first point I think is the more information the beekeeper provide to us, the better the recommendation we can make. The simplest recommendation we can make is movement and location because it's a given from our tech.

As soon as you tag an hive and you scan it, it will geolocalize that position. Then if you move it, will geolocalize again because we know you moved it. Moving is one part of the question, but as you may have thought, when you move things is also very important and the sequence in which you move things. If I go on a very bad protein quality crop like blueberry to do a pollenization contract and then move my hive into a cranberry one right after, and then right after that I go on another kind of crop that is really demanding on bees, I'm not giving any chance to those bees to catch up or be able to mitigate or reduce the effect of the previous contract they did. If I know, which is the big gain of tracking things, if I know that those bees were already in a blueberry contract before and a cranberry contract, maybe I'll move them to any producing yard because I have somewhere else that only went and did one contract two weeks ago.

The message is not reduce your business, reduce the number of contract you're doing because this would not be available. The message is more like, there's ways you can make the same amount of contract or even more contract without affecting your bees' health as much by just simply knowing what was done and what's the impact of what you're doing to the health of your bees basically.

It's actually a very complex question, this question of movement, because if we blindly-- A lot of beekeeper would like to have the simple answer like, is that a good yard? A good yard is a complex answer because, like I just mentioned, a good yard is really depending on when and what was done before and after.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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Jeff: So much depends on the data. The job that pays my bills every day, it's in IT, so I know garbage in, garbage out. I know that is a big important thing for what you're dealing with. How is data entry entered into your tracking system?

Max: Data entry happens between-- It's a multipronged technology. Basically, we've got an RFID tag that we place one on each colony. They've got a numerical value as well as a NFC, Near-Field Communication chip, and a QR code. We've got a mobile application back at the shop, we've got a manager portal, so that's a web browser access to view the data. On the field, you've got the tag and you've got the mobile application. When hives arrive at a new location, a beekeeper will scan with one of either NFC or QR, all of the hives at the location. Those will automatically be merged into a yard based on their coordinates.

From there, there's two different mechanisms to report. The hive level, the yard level. The yard level report can be applied to any hive in a given yard. You select the yard name, the hive IDs exist in that yard, but I can apply a feeding, a treatment, anything I would do at a yard level, anything I would observe at a yard level. Actually, most of the reporting is happening at the yard level, because migratory commercial beekeepers, that is how they operate. Most actions are taken at a yard level. The same thing will be done, the same treatment will be applied to every hive, the same feeding will be applied to every hive.

We also offer the capability to scan an individual hive or hives and submit a report that can include anything from marking the hive as a dead out, marking it as queenless, marking what queen line you've input, disease issues, really anything you want from the manager's portal.

You can set custom practices that can be seen in your app and then apply to either the hive or yard level.

Jeff: If a hive is part of a yard, so Hive 001, and it's been part of that yard for half a season and all of a sudden you go into a new pollination because you want to take that hive to a different field, you group it with another truck and you send it off and it's in another yard now, can you track the individual hive throughout the season, so if you need to say, "Oh, man, this one had American foulbrood. I need to see everything it was touching," is that possible?

Nico: Yes, definitely. Basically, each hive have a unique ID, so you can access its whole history. How it works is, basically, once you have moved that hive, on the next scan, next time you scan that tag, it will automatically relocate basically the RF to its new position. It will also prompt you to ask if it's the right yard you want to put it in, and just to make sure.

This is an interesting concept because if you know that, for example, you've been tracking varroa level for example in one yard, and then you know that some hive has-- You sample maybe 10% of that yard because let's say you're not a-- You don't have five hives in that yard. Maybe you have 96 or something, and then you're like, "Okay, I'll sample 10% or 20% of those. I have to get a sense of the varroa infestation there."

Let's say you get really high number, and then let's say you don't know that information, you just take half of those hives and bring it to a pollenization contract with 300 other hives. Then suddenly you might have increased a lot the risk of spreading varroa in those 300 hives. Knowing those kind of information can also prevent those kind of risk or action.

Jeff: Last question on the data collection. Can any of it be automated given today's prevalence of sensors and other types of devices?

Nico: We're really working to augment the intelligence of beekeepers. The idea is really, tell us what you're doing, put it in a form, and then from there, what can we learn to improve your behavior or reduce your risk or your costs? There's things we could automate, but in the same philosophy. There's an example I love because it's something I would really like to add to the product, but for example, frame of bees count. Let's say you count frame of bees. There's a cluster method, there's different technique. Let's say you go with the cluster method, so you just check on the top and the bottom of the box. You check and count the number of frame covered with bees. This is the task where computer vision and AI model is way more efficient than humans. You could have, for example, on your phone, you take a picture of the top of the hive and then it automatically would count the frame of bees and log that information so you wouldn't need to log it manually.

Those kind of assistance from the artificial intelligence to improve the quality of the data is definitely things that we would like to add to the product in the future, but sensor and connected objects is a path that we've stopped. We still do a bit of research on it, but the thing is, in the feasibility and how people use our product, the gain compared to the effort needed to put sensor in each hive and the cost of those sensor was not a factor that was important enough to justify it. We can do basically more with the form-based information than we could with the sensor.

Max: I would also add that with the form-based information, the way that we're doing data collection, there are implications that we can understand, they go above and beyond what the humans are actually doing to enter data. Forage, for example. Because we have GPS coordinates and dates, that means that we also have possibility to work with satellite data, and thus, connect bee health to forage availability, environment where the bees are, to weather data, wind speed.

Nico, this week, prepared a report that looked at wind speed as an effect on survivorship for one of our clients. Just by having location and timestamp, we can actually push further than what would be actually required from use of the application.

Jeff: At the time we're recording this, there's a lot of fires in Eastern Canada. I suspect you're going to have a lot of requests for the inclusion of information about the smoke levels for a given yard, whether that impacts the quality of honey or quality of the lifespan of the bee.

Max: Nico, as I was coughing my way through my walk last night, through the smoke cloud that is Southern Quebec right now, I was definitely considering that. We'll have to note the period of the year and come back to evaluate that later in the year and next year as we may learn interesting effects from the smoke.

Jeff: I noticed on the website that you also have the application and material in Spanish as well.

Max: Most users of the tool are primarily Spanish speaking. Within commercial operations, the vast majority of apiary workers are Latin American. We have to design and build for them. Not only is the app available in Spanish, but we have members of our team who speak Spanish, we do training in Spanish. There, I think, is an infinite amount to gain by having a strong relationship with the people who actually use the tool. If they're not happy, if they don't understand the value of what we're trying to bring them and enterprises where they work, we don't stand a chance of helping their businesses out.

Ever since we've really invested in making this experience great for the apiary worker, we've seen the acceptance of the product skyrocket. That helps apiary workers with their challenges, which sometimes are a little bit different from the managers, and inevitably, that helps generate quality data which helps managers with higher-level planning decisions that we might get from the data 6 months, 12 months, 18 months later.

Jeff: You're collecting all the information and you have headquarters where all the data filters and funnels in. What kind of reports and dashboards are available for the person making the decisions?

Nico: In the manager portal or I don't know how you call it, the manager central, I'm just making a joke, it's-- For now, we basically have couple things which are-- We have metrics that basically show you your average varroa level, your average movement, and Max mentioned the total number of hive, the total number of yard, also a degrading of your hives, so if you have weak, medium, strong or a frame of bees, things like that. We also have basically another beekeeper managed operation of commercial beekeeper with what we call a whiteboard. It's like a big whiteboard where they draw what they did at the yard level and to keep track like, let's say, I'm in the end of the season. I need to treat for varroa three times or I treat that yard twice, so I need to go one more time, for example.

We have actually digitalized that whiteboard and we actually have a release coming where-- a lot of improvement on that in the next couple days. Also, in that same release, we'll have the progression of those metric I talked about, so not only what is it today, but what was it last year and what was it the week before, so you could see how things progress.

Let's say you know your varroa spikes at the end of August, and maybe you can see that, oh, it seems to follow the same strain as last year, so maybe I'll treat because I want to avoid that spike this year, for example.

In addition to that, we also have a pollenization feature, which I won't get too much into that, but ease basically the management and tracking of the contract you have and also automate a contract in PDF that you can have or you get ready to go to share with your client.

Another service we offer is basically we do custom reports. Let's say you've entered things about your queens, you've entered things about movement, or you just have a specific question you would like the data science team to take a look at. Basically, we'll analyze your data and answer your question or try to, and then send you a report where you could see your data and how basically your data can answer your question. Basically, those reports combine different level of complexity. Sometimes it's just a bar chart or a table, and sometimes it's all the way to complex deep learning models. It depends what's the question.

Jeff: Does the tool also provide predictive management alerts based on the information, maybe the movements or the last time you treated for varroa for a particular yard? Does it come up and say, "Hey, it's been so many days since your last treatment. You might want to consider treatment in the next couple of days."?

Nico: It's definitely coming in the product. For now, in the short term, like couple week, basically been working on a mortality predictor model where I can predict if a hive survive in the future, for example, after winter. That model showed maybe promising performance, I think, mainly because I don't think nobody has ever built a model with that many hive. We have not 500, 1,000 or 2,000 hive we used for that model, but over 100,000 hive, which is unseen for this kind of problem, which leads to much better performance.

With that model, basically, what we can do is use it in different ways. We can use it to help you predict what will be your population after winter, so you can maximize your contract, maximize maybe selling nukes, things like that. We can also use it as a feedback during the season. It's what's coming in a couple of days. Basically, it's going to be a score of probability. Basically, it won't be seen like that, but the back end will be the probability that the hive will survive. Basically, if you think about it, the probability that you survive is a representation of your current health. If I'm really healthy right now and everything that needed to be done on the hive has been done, most likely that score will be high. If there's marker from the historical data set we have that we see that these type of contexts at that time of the year often lead to very bad survival, then the model will learn that, or maybe you need to take some action. The first step is to show the score, second step we work towards assimilation and also then recommendation. Hopefully the goal would be, in the medium term, to have basically suggested action to take on your hives to maximize their health.

Max: I'd add that I think with any kind of sophisticated data science technology, you have a chicken or egg situation where, of course, you need high-quality data in order to deliver users, in this case, beekeepers, high-quality recommendations. If you don't have the high-quality recommendations, building those tools can be difficult. Our approach, which I think is working really well for us right now, is really to build the most sophisticated but basic and usable tools today for beekeepers. That's where digital asset management comes in, right?

Beekeepers who are transitioning towards a future, which I think at Nectar we believe the future is prescription-based, where we are augmenting the intelligence of beekeepers supported by data models. The way that we get beekeepers comfortable with that and also build the products and recommendations that are useful for them is with high-quality data. Today, we can generate high-quality data simply by building tools that help them keep track of accurate hive numbers. Those tools can help them with regulatory reporting, can help them with navigating to yards, can help them with selecting which tasks to do today based on which tasks have been completed in the past.

Very simple digitization of what previously had been either in a beekeeper's head, on a whiteboard, or in a melange mix of different spreadsheets not associated with individual colonies, and then therefore, not associated with actual outcomes of the living livestock that is an individual colony. By digitizing with Nectar, we can start to layer in some of those predictive models, but we don't need to necessarily rush towards it because we can offer value today.

Jeff: I'd imagine as you have more history with the product, collect more data, you have more variety and different beekeepers adding to that data, you can use all of that data to help with any of your predictive directions or any predictive management tools that you might be able to develop once you have that data and you start applying some, the term of the day, some AI, some artificial intelligence to it and start working that data. That's where the real value of all this will be once you can actually start manipulating, using that data to predict the future.

Nico: What excites me the most as a beekeeper and data geek is the fact that honey bee research or scientific paper is enormous. There's thousand of positive paper. If you go in this literature and look for the impact of management practices on honey bees, suddenly you find maybe 10 paper. It's really interesting that there's so many books, at least 30 books just here, that all say the same thing about managing bees. It's like, "Oh, you should go on a 10-day pace or 14-days pace," or depending upon the season, go more and go less in honey season. Things like that, or a way of treating, supplement, feeding, all those things have been built on very observational or soft science. It's not necessarily bad. I believe in soft science, and not everything is found in the data. Some things are not interpreted data, but in that case, I really believe that we could really help all the beekeeper, and not only our clients or commercial beekeeper. We'll be able to understand things from the data in different contexts. Right now, we're all across North America, but soon enough, we'll expand outside of that region. Then we'll understand what's the impact of management practices in different contexts, and then we'll be able to not beekeep with rules. We'll beekeep with the intelligence that is personalized to your need. Maybe you don't visit the hive for 30 days, maybe it's the best thing you can do. Things like that that seems a bit odd today, but could be--

Jeff: Are you working with other organizations and developing a bee data standard, so like COLOSS or-- We've had James Wilkes and Joseph Cazier on the show in the past, and they've been working on a bee data standard. Are you working to help standardize any of that data collection?

Max: At the moment, we're not collaborating with any of these parties. We're friends with James, a big fan of his. I would love to see something like this happen. I'm sure Nico can talk about the power of it in the future. I think there are some roadblocks to make this happen, in that most of the the players in the space are scrappy startups looking to move quickly, to be completely transparent, looking to move quickly, and so collaboration at that stage is difficult. I see the benefit of it and I do hope that we can, as an industry, work something along those lines out.

Jeff: As soon as you start talking standards, things grind to a very slow pace, both in development, acceptance, and rolling out. We're talking about 10 years from now, but still, it'd be great to be able to have your reporting tool work almost seamlessly through an API with-- API meaning the just programmatic interface with other applications or sensors or devices, and so that it's a lot easier for everybody to work together and ultimately for the beekeeper to have as much useful

information available to them to make important decisions.

Max: I think that's the future, and obviously, there are other technology companies in beekeeping. I think one of the barriers is that, at the moment, there is yet to be one technology that is really spread across the industry at a very high scale. I think when that happens, that gives everyone a central technology or product to plug in with, that, I don't want to say necessarily will influence everyone else, but that has made enough progress to really show why we should collaborate with that single partner. The reality is, at the moment, that technology is Google. It's Google spreadsheets, it's Microsoft.

Jeff: Excel spreadsheets. Yes.

Max: It's Excel. It's Excel spreadsheets. Those are the technologies that are the most widespread at this moment.

Jeff: I wasn't singling Nectar Technologies out directly. It's really an industry question and I've asked everybody else that question too. As a neophyte data geek, I would like to see some standardization between all of the products, but that's just me.

Nico: Even within the product, it's a challenge. I think the biggest challenge with our data is the fact that it's highly heterogeneous, meaning that beekeepers do different things. They do different things and log different things in different ways. Without going into too much tech, but there's ways to manage that from a purely tech point, like software point. Ideally, it's educating people about what is good data, what is data, and how we can bring them to understand the impact of logging things inaccurately or randomly. I think once we solve that, then the second challenge is never going to be solved, which is just a challenge of the problem, but we don't know what we don't know.

The hard thing in our field is that we could never ask a beekeeper unless it's Nico and use BeeTrack, but you cannot track everything. Tracking everything takes too much time and it leads to more error too because you have a hand full of bees and you want to log 15 data points like it's just feasible. I think there's a challenge to be solved internally. It's a great idea. Maybe we can start some discussion about a global standardization.

Jeff: There's a reason why they call it the art of beekeeping, right? You have to just fly by the seat of your pants at times and it looks like it's going to be that way for a while yet. Very good, guys. Max, Nico, I can't believe how fast time flies, but again, we're talking about data and bees, so I'm in heaven here. Is there anything we haven't discussed yet that you would like to talk about?

Max: I think it would be interesting to speak to one or two of the, I'd say, more general learnings that we've had through the data that could be applied to a lot of beekeepers listening to this right now. A few different projects that Nico's worked on. Nico, I don't know if you want to drop in some of the work you're doing, and writing up a blog on the difference between imported and local queens in Quebec.

Nico: Yes. What's interesting about their data is we can use it in different ways. Not always to answer a specific question to a customer, but sometimes to ask bigger question. I was in a meeting with queen breeders a couple months ago and they were discussing the topic of how important it is to use local queen. That topic is, I'm sure, very recurrent in a lot of beekeeper discussions. The argument for it is often that those queen will perform better, and perform is often referred to winter survival, better winter survival. It makes a lot of sense theoretically from-- Those queen are better acclimated to your region and should perform better, but I wanted to go validate that from a purely data-driven perspective. Like just look at our customer in Quebec and look at the queen that are local versus imported and compare their survival. Interestingly, I didn't find any difference in survival for both those group.

If you go more down the line, what's even more interesting is that those queen, you have access to those imported queen earlier in the season. The age of the Queen, when it enters into winter, is actually a strong driver of the mortality of the hive. If you wait mid-July or early July to get your local Queen because maybe a new region, you can get it a bit earlier, maybe early June or mid-June. It's still much later than the Californian queens. You could get, for example, in early April or even before that. That queen takes time to accomplish itself, and actually, the impact of the age is maybe more important than the origin of it, which is quite interesting. I'm not saying by any means don't buy local, because there's a lot of other argument to buy local queens like encouraging your local beekeeper, your local industry. I think it's important for continuity or asking those questions too because it's not 5,000 hives that gives the whole answer or picture, but I just think it's interesting to ask those questions because they challenge what we think we know and actually we don't know.

Jeff: Well, Max, Nico, Nectar Technology, or nectar.buzz, I appreciate you being here today. It's exciting what you're doing. I enjoyed talking to you and I am sure that we'll have you back in the future to find out, number one, what you're up to, but also some of the interesting facts and observations you've made based on the data you've collected and are able to play with. Look forward to that.

Max: Awesome. Great to be here. Always a pleasure to come on and talk bees and data.

Jeff: Yes, it is. [laughs]

Nico: Likewise, I'm a big fan of the show, so pretty happy to be here.

Jeff: Well, thank you. Thank you. We'll look forward to having you back.

Nico: Likewise.

Max: We'll be back. Take care.

Jeff: 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, wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd 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 Betterbee 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 and comments at leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:48:27] [END OF AUDIO]