It enables metered, uniform delivery of plant protection products to crops using commercial honeybees.
Bee Vectoring Technologies International Inc. has announced that the Company has been granted a US patent for the latest version of its honeybee hive dispenser system. The new system is computer-controlled and enables metered, uniform delivery of plant protection products to crops using commercial honeybees. This is the first patent on its honeybee dispenser system, and represents the first patent in a fifth overall area of technology of the Company.
“Our patented system can be efficiently added on to commercial honeybee hives, for growers to get the added value of disease control on top of pollinating their crops,” said Ashish Malik, CEO of Bee Vectoring Technologies. “This new computer-controlled version makes crop protection delivery even more effective and consistent.”
The system is part of BVT’s growth strategy to service 2.88 million (1) commercial bee hives in the US and 91 million (2) worldwide. Leveraging both honeybee and bumblebee systems extends the Company’s reach to 100% of the bee vectoring market opportunity for flowering crops, including high volume crops such as almonds, sunflowers and apples, and high value crops such as blueberries, melons, strawberries and raspberries.
BVT’s bumblebee system, the Company’s initial product offering, is being successfully adopted by growers east of the Rockies. In the western US, however, commercial bumblebees are not used for pollination or bee vectoring. The honeybee system is therefore critical to BVT’s growth in those areas, especially in the berry-dense Pacific Northwest and in California – the single largest agriculture market in the US, where BVT was recently granted regulatory approval. In California, there are 1.3 million acres of key crops for the Company to target and 1.1 million3 of them are already using commercial honeybees for pollination.
“The patented honeybee system maximizes our market opportunity,” said Ian Collinson, Sales Manager at Bee Vectoring Technologies. “It has been in use with growers commercially since early 2020 in key US blueberry and caneberry regions including the Southeast, Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Northwest. It’s also being used in California demonstration trials on almond and berry crops. We even have grower customers who use the honeybee and bumblebee systems together to maximize pollination and disease management.”
