Apimondia 2025
I (Nico) had the chance to go to Apimondia 2025 which was hosted in Copenhagen, Danemark. I presented two talks for Nectar and the poster below for Cubee.
Being in the city almost 17 years since the last time I was here, was quite nostalgic. First, I had to take a big walk and drink a Carlsberg on a terrasse before getting to the serious stuff.
First I ran into John Keyfuss. He's an amazing beekeeper and scientific mind. Can you believe he's even able to be generous of his time? Back in Apimondia 2023 in Chile where I went by myself, John really made my week much more fun by introducing me to everyone. Therefore, this time around, we spent a couple of minutes looking at the program and spoke about what interested us at this Apimondia ! John spent the week introducing us to interesting beekeepers and I hope every time we cross paths we can chat a bit more! See you in 2027 at the next Apimondia, Sir!
As I just mentioned, I was at Apimondia Chile in 2023 so I had an idea of what was coming. However, the beauty of Apimondia is the cultural interpretation of the meeting. Both events were amazing experiences, but in totally different ways. In both cases, the presentations were amazing and the venues were well organized. I got the chance to taste some traditional and less traditional Scandinavian meads and honeys. Sadly, I didn't have the time to do a trip and go see some apiaries, but there is always next time!
I was also not travelling alone this time. I was joined by Marc, my partner at Nectar, and Maxime my colleague in data science at Nectar as well. In this blog, I just wanted to tease a little about all the amazing things that we saw at Apimondia. However, I'll reserve that for one of our Nectar blog posts since I had a 95% focus on Nectar during this specific conference.
Here, I just wanted to present the Cubee poster we worked on and provide some context to it, so here we go.
Since 2021, we've been testing hives in the field with Miellerie Flavo which are tracked with the Nectar Technology. Nectar allows us to track many things, even sound recording and pictures. Therefore, we've been tracking data at each visit in the season (which extends from April to October), such as: the frames of bees, the frames of brood, the varroa drop rate on the bottom board, the queen state, the colony state, the aggressivity level, the Cubee supplementation event and the honey yield.
In 2022-2023, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, we supplemented 50% of colonies randomly. In 2025-2026, we scaled the supplementation to all colonies with different regimen. By tracking everything we do, we can subset our dataset for different experiments and/or group hives to understand different experiments and to ask larger questions. We grouped the hives that got supplemented at different moments, but used a proper survival analysis method to grasp the potential time dependance effect.
In the poster, you can see the positive effect on hive growth in terms of frames of bees and brood, the positive effect on hive and queen longevity, as well as the indirect effect of Cubee on varroa. Once we ran statistical analysis and built prior knowledge about the expected effects of Cubee on colony state, we built a Bayesian Network which allowed us to challenge our prior knowledge with data and get closer to a causal effect.
The output of the Bayesian model is actionnable and allows us to truly understand the system and the impact of Cubee on this very system. The network outputs biologically coherent predictions which increases our trust in the model and the effects of Cubee.
We're finishing the scientific paper and a cage trial experiment at the moment. Therefore, more information will come to light shortly, so stay in touch. For now, here is our poster:
