Kate Lyall, a nuclear scientist at Hunter Imaging, and her farmer/bee keeper husband David are driving agTech outfit Bee Innovative.

The seed for their business came in 2016 at their Hunter property, when they were discussing the Varroa parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on the honey bees, Apis mellifera.

"Australia is the last country in the world that doesn't have it and experts are saying it's not a matter of it, but when," says Kate "and when it does it will spread through landscape and make beekeeping very difficult."

In contact with US beekeepers whose hives were decimated by the mite, the Lyalls' chat about whether to keep their hives if the mite arrived quickly moved to scientifically questioning why other countries had been unable to identify the mite.

"We looked at why the USA and NZ had not found the mite when it first arrived and the reason is they didn't have the technology around identifying and tracking bees in real time," says Kate. "I have a background in molecular imaging, so we went, 'Well, what can we create that can identify and track bees?'

The Lyalls developed two products in their Bee Innovative tech platform to deliver greater certainty and control for farmers using precision pollination, and to safeguard the nation's biosecurity.

Their BeeDar uses a radar, attached to a drone, to gather data to create a map which tells farmers where they are receiving good pollination from bees and, crucially, where they are not - allowing them to manage their bee hives to increase production.

"As beekeepers we provide bees as a pollination service - when crops are in flower we bring bee hives into the crop for about 6 weeks. Bees play a critical role, helping to create more food and of a better quality,' says Kate.

"Pollinated agriculture in about 100 crops is worth $14 billion annually in Australia and the bee industry is the small wheel that keeps a lot of big wheels turning.

"A farmer's entire year's work comes down to six weeks as to whether bees pollinate the crop and yet one farmer told us he doesn't know where his bees go - he just crosses his fingers and hopes they will pollinate."

The second Bee Innovative platform is BeeID, which uses facial recognition technology with aggregated data to accurately track bees and act as a first line of defence for the identification and eradication of exotic bees and bee diseases like the Varroa mite.

Having trained with CSIRO ON and The Business Centre, the Lyalls are fielding global enquiries as they trial BeeDar in NSW.

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