One Year Later: How Cubee Helped Beekeepers Boost Hive Survival
Cubee | Nectar trial results
In October 2024, we sent 1400 doses of Cubee to 8 Nectar users. We’ve only asked to track survival and the Cubee supplementation event. Some did track more such as strength which allowed us to look a little deeper but here we’ll focus on the impact of Cubee on hives longevity. A year after the start of this experiment, we are ready to compute the results and assess the impact of Cubee in commercial operations across North America!
To understand the impact of Cubee on hive longevity, we’ve cleaned these data and only kept the hives that were in the same yards as the one supplemented in Fall 2024 to remove potential impact of location from the analysis. A total of 438 supplemented colonies and 1395 control colonies located in Canada and the US.
Then, we used proper survival analysis to analyze the impact of Cubee on longevity. We’ve stratified the analysis by region in order to potentially grasp any regional variations in the effect of Cubee. From our research, we are expecting about a 20% increase in survival. Matching these effects would increase our confidence in Cubee being efficient in all beekeeping contexts.
Global results on longevity and survival
Here’s the global results on all hives and control hives (i.e. hives within the same yard at the moment of the supplementation). We assume all hives are managed equally by the beekeeper which suggests that supplemented and other hives might get mixed in other locations following the experiment start. In the graph below, we can observe a large positive effect of Cubee on hive longevity. The difference is statistically significant and supplementing colonies will lead to an increase in survival probability during the given period where control colonies were alive of 15.5%. Additionally, no control colonies were observed alive after 837 days while some cubeed colonies are still alive over 1200 days! This represents more than a 20% increase in expected longevity.
Note that we’ve also observed a positive effect on hives strength however the data points were too sparse to run a proper statistical analysis. We did look at impact on growth during our research and found a strong significant signal when Cubee was applying for increased growth. Side note, the belief of the beekeeper on why the colony died was biased towards swarming for cubed hives compared to control hives suggesting that Cubee may have led to unexpected rapid growth of the colony.
US vs Canada variation
To avoid spoiling specific locations but still take a jab at potential regional effects, we ran a quick analysis to look at the difference between supplemented colonies in the US and in Canada for the same period. In the future, we plan to go deeper into the impact of weather on this supplement. However, one of the large benefits of Cubee compared to probiotics is that Reishi, the main mushroom in Cubee, is a PREbiotic. Meaning that rather than trying to add a specific community of yeast and bacteria to promote your hive microbiome, Cubee will promote what’s there already. Therefore, it diminishes the risk of strong regional impact specially that Cubee is not temperature or humidity sensitive.
As expected, we didn’t observe a statistical significance between the effect on colonies in different locations (p-value: 0.436).
Comparing these results with our research results
We presented our latest results in Apimondia 2025 from our 4 years of field study on about 100 hives per season. These results show about a 18% increase in survival compared to control hives in a more robust design experiment than this large scale study.
Matching these results with this current study confirms the large potential of Cubee for beekeeping. We are now looking deeper into understanding how Cubee works and the potential other benefits of supplementation such as pesticide detoxification or increased honey yield. As of today, we are confident that Cubee will increase your survival and productivity!
When and how to apply Cubee
At first, we focused our research on fall supplementation but over the years we’ve shown that Cubee can be applied at any time during the season. The moments that lead to the highest results are a spring supplementation and an early August one (i.e. to hit the winter bee larvae).
We’ve wrote a little blog to help you know when and how to apply Cubee
→ Read it here