Bee keepers interview

We gave surveys to bee keepers across France who worked between 5 and 45 years and carry between 5 and more than 400 beehives.
From those, we found that more than 59% of the bee keepers are concerned by the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder.
We also saw that 69% of them had no prevention system and 22% of them are not satisfied by their current prevention system.
We then asked them if our detection system may be useful to detect pesticids, pathogens or parasites and heavy metals. Most of them answered yes.
As you can see in the following figure, more than 80% of bee keepers interviewed are interested by our system.

We also asked if they thought of enhancements on our system. We summarized the most interesting ideas:

1. ➟ Preventing phytosanitary products
2. ➟ Blocking contamination by virus and parasites
3. ➟ Manufacturing a test to evaluate bees’ stress

When we asked how frequent they would use our system, most of them said they would use it at least every month, while others only between seasons.
Bee keepers found this project interesting but we also wanted to confront the researchers on the subject to get more scientific data.

Researchers interview

The meetings with researchers allowed us to get more insight on the real problems underlying the death of the bees
Those researchers were specialized on different aspect of bees : pathology, agronomy, chemistry, environment and agro ecology.

For the Bee Subtilis Project, we asked whether the parameters we decided to detect were useful. Here are the results:

We wondered which parameters they believed we should use in our detection system. Several answers were offered:

1. ➟ Food Availability
2. ➟ Presence of Virus or Parasites (Nosema for instance)
3. ➟ Heat Stress

When we asked if they would find any use of this test on their research project:
33% of them said they could use it once a month for research

So it seems this test could be very interesting as a control of the health state of the beehive.
Yet we have still a long way to go before improving the detection target list.