Bear-proof beehive invention is all the buzz
Patent pending on device made by climate control expert
John Rocheleau read with interest a recent article about a bear wreaking havoc on beehives in Chelmsford.
The article told of the bear, nicknamed “Sully” by locals who have been seeing it around for years, particularly showing a fondness for beehives in the yard of Mike Erhartic. Sully destroyed Erhartic’s three hives, along with the 120,000 honeybees that lived and worked there. Erhartic decided he would retire from his beekeeping hobby because he knew Sully would be back.
Rocheleau’s interest derived from the fact that he has invented a bear-proof beehive, patent pending.
For more than 150 years, beekeepers around the world have been using the Langstroth Bee
Hive, which has barely changed its design or updated its technology in all that time. Rocheleau, a resident of Sandwich, N.H., is a lifelong master in climate control for human habitats and has invented several industry-related products.
Rocheleau decided the world needs something better to protect its bees.
Among the myriad problems with the Langstroth hive, he says, is that it is proven ineffective against the strength and cunning of a hungry brown bear.
Beekeepers often fall victim to bears’ love of honey. Not only is it bad for the beekeeper, but it’s bad for the brood as the bees all die when their hives are destroyed. And, according to Rocheleau, the Langstroth hives are bad for the species as a whole, for many reasons, aside from the ursine vandalism.
Motivated first by a desire to protect the species, Rocheleau designed and built Bee Fortress Smart Hives, which bring Indoor Climate Control technology into the apiaries. And with a team of local craftsmen that includes Coating Systems, Inc., in Lowell, Metalcrafters of Methuen and T-Square Drafting in Wilmington, Rocheleau’s revolutionary system is ready to make a buzz in the beekeeping world.
“John came to us about two and half or three years ago with his first new beehive design,” said Walter Bristol of T-Square Drafting. “He was convinced a beehive needed to be better than the ancient standards of most beehives in common use today.”
According to Bristol, Rocheleau said that there is “a significant need for a beehive to be viable, pro
ductive, as well as to protect its population of honey bees.”
“He stated that he had a better idea and gave us a thorough explanation of just how and why this was needed. From that first design task, where we documented John’s ideas for the Bee Fortress in our 3-D CAD models, John’s vision was received with a good deal of excitement here,” Bristol added. “We all felt we were doing something special. There were likely about three or four iterations of the design before we arrived at the Bee Fortress we were all looking for.”
But after his initial prototype was toppled, though not damaged, by a brazen bear, he went the extra step toward creating a durable, self-sustaining beehive, impervious to trespassers and malevolent fauna like those pesky North American black bears.
The unique network of straps, hooks and concrete make the Bee Fortress impenetrable for even the most persistent bears. And he has the videos to prove it.
Built mostly of hardwood, sheet metal and some small electronic components, the Bee Fortress Smart Hive gets its core impenetrability from the concrete pad it’s strapped to.
In his videos, Rocheleau shows a large bear getting frustrated after failed attempts to access the sweet lode inside. Bite marks and scratches on the poplar frame highlight the futility. The bear leaves the site. Another video from another night shows another bear engaged in the same routine of effort and failure.
But Bee Fortress is more than just a protection from predators, or “robbers,” as they are called in the industry.
Rocheleau does not keep
Beekeepers often fall victim to bears’ love of honey. Not only is it bad for the beekeeper, but it’s bad for the brood as the bees all die when their hives are destroyed.
bees for the honey they produce and never harvests the honey.
“That is their over-winter food that sustains them,” he said.
Rather, he keeps the bees to pollinate the acre of wildflowers he has planted on his property and “to cross-pollinate my vegetable garden,” he said.
His bee colonies are vital contributors to his agrarian lifestyle. They keep the delicate ecosystem in balance, as nature intended.
“If I rob the honey from the hives, the bees will starve without it,” he said. “Commercial and hobbyist beekeepers will replace the honey they rob from the colony with liquid and solid white sugar — sucrose — which is a carbohydrate with almost none of the nourishment bees need to survive over the winter, until springtime, when nature again provides flower nectar for them.”
The inner structure of his Smart Hive accepts standard Langsthroth honeycomb frames, but everything else is of his own design. Both contain brood boxes where the queen lives and lays eggs that the nurse bees maintain until they hatch, and “honey supers,” where the honey is deposited and stored as a food source, along with pollen.
Langstroths and Rocheleau’s Smart Hives usually contain eight frames within the hive boxes that are replete with wax-formed honeycomb meant for keeping nectar, honey and pollen.
But where the Bee Fortress Smart Hive again outperforms the traditional Langstroth hive design is in the climate within. Rocheleau’s patent-pending designs tap into his expertise as a licensed, career indoor climate-control expert and developer of HVAC products since 1996.
A solar-powered ventilation-system-in-a-box mounts atop the Smart Hive’s frame boxes, just under the roof, to variably control CO2, humidity and temperature inside the hive.
Rocheleau has demonstrated that controlling humidity inside the hive during the bees’ honey production vastly improves the production of honey. Last year, one of his colonies produced 11.75 pounds of New Hampshire Seacoast honey, thanks to the help of the Smart Hive’s socalled Ventilation Box.
Many forces foreign to the natural world conspire to make it difficult for bees to make honey, never mind survive until the next season. Bears, humans and other robbers coalesce against bees in their effort to simply survive, as their genes direct them to do, year after year, millennia after millennia. Rocheleau said his mission is to help them do just that.
Rick Reault, owner at New England Beekeeping Supplies in Tyngsboro, when asked if he would sell Rocheleau’s Bee Fortress at his Tyngsboro shop, said, “We’re always in the market for new products. Anything that works.”
Let’s see if Sully can bear that.