The third-generation commercial beekeeper innovating the dark art of beekeeping
What’s the buzz around the Canberra beekeeping startup? We chatted with HiveIQ, a Canberra company changing the beekeeping business through its Canberra-manufactured beehives and software.
Victor Croker and his son, Xavier, are on the road and pulling into their North Carolina motel when I call him on a frosty minus 4 degrees Celsius Canberra morning. He’s on a road trip around the US, beehives on the back of the truck, on a journey to sell his Canberra-built hives overseas.
Beekeeping in the blood
Croker is a third-generation commercial beekeeper who began working as a professional beekeeper when he was 14. The legacy started with his grandmother, who got into commercial beekeeping during World War II in her 20s. His father and uncle then picked it up, running a large operation with around 2,500 hives. Daughter Sophie - aged 20 - is the fourth generation.
“There’s a connection between honey bees and your soul.”
‘Beekeeping gets in your blood,’ he said. ‘I’ll go away and think I’ve had enough of this. It’s too hard work – whatever – but I’ll always come back. There’s a connection between honey bees and your soul. When the bees are doing really well and are producing nice quantities of honey and building new wax that’s all nice and white and beautiful, and they’re healthy – it makes you feel good. But when they’re down and struggling and suffering from the cold, clustered up and have mould growing on their hive, it affects your mood and how you feel.’
A two-week visit to Canberra to hang out with his brother became a permanent career move and a long-term break from beekeeping. Croker worked instead on delivering Adobe’s experience cloud platform to Federal Government departments. Through this experience, Croker learnt the importance of the User Experience (UX), something he would later apply to bees. ‘You can have the best software in the world, but without an exceptional UX, people will not use it,’ he said.
Then he was tricked into getting back into beekeeping.
Ballet to bees
In 2010, Croker was in the garage with friend David Leemhuis building props for their daughters' ballet concert. Leemhuis had always wanted to be a beekeeper but had no connections. He discovered Croker had been a commercial beekeeper and decided they should go into business. ‘And I think it was a fine bottle of port involved, maybe,’ Croker reminisced.
‘When Dave (Leemhuis) said to me, oh, I’m thinking about getting some hives, I thought he meant just getting a few for a hobby, and I said, yeah, sure if you want to do a bit of beekeeping, I’ll help you get some hives running,’ Croker said. But Leemhuis wasn’t talking about just 5 or 10: he wanted a few hundred commercial hives.
Croker thought about it ‘for 10 minutes or so’ and then agreed to help. They purchased traditional box hives, based on the Langstroth design that has been around for 170 years, and started keeping bees. Then winter came.
Bees and Canberra cold
The 2010 winter in Canberra was cold and wet. Mould grew inside the poorly insulated wooden hives, and the bees struggled as condensation dripped off the hive ceiling. ‘This is crazy!’ recounted Croker. ‘There’s got to be a better home for our bees.’
“There’s got to be a better home for our bees”
They discovered insulated beehives made from EPS products in Europe. In their first full beekeeping season using the new hives, the bees produced 35 per cent more honey than the traditional wooden hives.
The easy path would have been for them to keep sourcing EPS hives from Europe. But the source companies were too slow to implement their ideas for improvement and optimisation. ‘We also wanted to take the hive design to a whole new level with the integration of sensors and technologies that would collect valuable data on what was happening in the hive,’ said Croker.
Instead, they engaged an industrial designer, Brant Trim, and created their own. Croker convinced Trim to join them during a three-day lap around the Grand Canyon in a Shelby Mustang. Trim not only came on board but also introduced them to industrial designer Jon Dyer. This led to their innovative beekeeping hive design.
Beekeeping software
But wait, there’s more. HiveIQ has not only modernised the design of beehives, but Croker and the HiveIQ team have developed revolutionary beekeeping management software to empower existing and new beekeepers to keep healthier and more productive hives.
‘Beekeeping has been a dark art for hundreds of years,’ said Croker. ‘It’s usually a skill passed on from generation to generation – most commercial beekeeping businesses in Australia are multi-generational family businesses.’
The software helps distil lessons learnt by making the process more data-driven. ‘Beekeeping is a complex business – more complex than most farming – because you need to know a lot about the environment’, said Croker.
“It’s going to help beekeepers make better decisions, run more efficient businesses, and keep healthier colonies”
The software enables beekeepers to log data points in the production process, such as how much they harvest and from which hives. It also allows them to track environmental factors such as weather and flora, which is especially important to migratory beekeepers. For instance, Coolabah trees in the outback near Mount Hope won’t flower unless they get a lot of rain, and it will take six to eight weeks until they do. Tracking high rainfall helps migratory beekeeping businesses know when best to plan when to move the hives. ‘It’s going to help beekeepers make better decisions, run more efficient businesses, and keep healthier colonies,’ he said.
‘We use the software every day to manage every aspect of our operation – which drives constant improvement with new beekeeper centric functionality,’ said Croker.
The software also has the potential to help manage outbreaks of varroa mites by providing a workflow to record and identify things such as when treatment was administered, the type of chemicals administered and a reminder of when next to treat.
Coming to America
On 29 May, Croker landed at Los Angels airport. It’s a road trip with a purpose, with Croker’s goal to get HiveIQ stocked by 10 dealers in the United States; so far, he has over 40 and (having extended his trip by a month) is aiming at 50.
Croker’s experience as a beekeeper means he can connect with US beekeepers in an authentic way. ‘The overwhelmingly positive response from the American beekeeping community to our hives and products has been humbling,’ he said.
Camped by a billabong
The genesis of many of HiveIQ’s ideas and products came about through campfire discussions about how to transform the 170-year beekeeping industry.
While the business is growing domestically – and now internationally - Croker and Leemhuis still maintain 1,500 hives of bees, which they move around ten times a year. The season starts in Victoria in late winter with flowering almond orchards, moves into seed canola pollination in New South Wales, then citrus and orange orchards around Griffith before focusing on eucalyptus trees and other natives. The cofounders spend much time in the outback in places like Mount Hope, taking their swags and a camp fridge and sleeping by a billabong or river under the stars.
“Give me a swag anyday”
‘It’s a lifestyle that’s not for everyone, but we prefer that than staying in a hotel room,’ he said. ‘I’ve been staying in hotel rooms for the last six or seven weeks [while in the US], but give me a swag any day.’
Their beehives are placed on large private properties with the permission of the owners. ‘And you sort of build the rapport up with those property owners,’ he said. ‘We supply them in honey and obviously take care of them for letting us come on their property.’
‘It’s pretty tough out there,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘We’re definitely not having fun.’
Investing in their Canberra business
‘We’ve put everything into this thing,’ said Croker, of their financial commitment to their business. They were inducted into the Federal Government’s Entrepreneurs Program in 2019, which gave them access to small business and innovation grants. They then got some angel investors onboard and received a Manufacturing Modernisation Fund grant in October 2021.
Building a factory during COVID wasn’t easy. Supply chain issues caused delays: a boiler was supposed to take three months but ended up taking nine. The overall project blew out by six months, and the original budget also blew away as well. They had a tough transition period, but supportive investors ensured they could see their way through.
HiveIQ has been supported in their business by the Canberra Innovation Network, including being mentored on an incubator program by Dr Craig Davis, which helped HiveIQ develop key business skills.
HiveIQ’s factory is at 4/62 Dacre St, Mitchell. It is open to the public from Monday to Friday, and unless the Coolabah trees are flowering out near Mount Hope, you are likely to meet David Leemhuis who can give you a personalised tour.
