Bee Vectoring Technologies Announces Filing for Patent on New Honeybee Delivery System

Bee Vectoring Technologies (TSXV:BEE) announced the filing of a patent application with the US patent office for a delivery system of plant protection products to crops using commercial honeybees.
As quoted in the press release:

There are an estimated 80 million commercial honeybee hives in use worldwide. The newly developed BVT system is compatible with most commercial honeybee hives and is designed to deliver a wide variety of plant protection products, such as BVT’s proprietary BVT-CR7 biological control agent, that inhibit or eliminate common diseases and pests in crops that are pollinated by honeybees. These include almonds, apples, melons, and sunflowers. This system is a highly effective alternative to spraying application methods that use a lot of water, and has the potential to dramatically reduce the quantity of chemicals that are sprayed on the crops.
In initial trials in sunflowers in Ontario in 2016, the BVT honeybee system uniformly delivered the BVT-CR7 biological control agent to the crop and produced a 31% increase in yield for the grower. Additional work in 2016 treating sunflowers in the US with BVT-CR7 using bumblebees showed effective suppression of sclerotinia, a devastating and costly disease in sunflowers, and one for which there is currently no viable protective solution. More trials of the honeybee system are scheduled for 2017 on sunflowers and other crops.
“This new honeybee delivery system, together with BVT’s proprietary crop protection products, represents a significant additional market opportunity for the company. Honeybees are already used to pollinate many large-acre outdoor crops. In the US, the value of crops that benefit from pollination by honeybees is close to $20 billion, and in California alone there are almost a million acres of almond trees that rely on approximately one million honeybee hives every year for pollination.” stated Ashish Malik, CEO of BVT. “We will be continuing to test our new system in field conditions this year and making further refinements to the design based on testing data if and where required.”

Click here for the full press release.