Sweet solution after hard lessons

Jessica Brunner was stung by her first experience of harvesting honey – both figurately and literally (and a lot). 

“My first experience at harvest five years ago was catastrophic,” the hobby beekeeper from Western Australia said. 

“Using existing available equipment, I lost over 6kg of honey, killed thousands of bees, and was injured falling under the weight of the super.  

“Frames and honey went everywhere, and angry bees followed.”   

Ms Brunner first had to remove her frames of honey – which weighed 30kg - to the front of her home to start the extraction process away from the bees. Unfortunately, she tripped and fell over as she was walking down the side of the house. 

“Honey frames went everywhere, and the bees attacked me. I had to go inside, shut the door and wait for nighttime to salvage what I could,” she said. 

She thought the front yard was far enough away to not upset the bees, but it was not. 

“They can smell their honey and chase you for several kilometres,” she said. 

“I got attacked again.” 

Her third incident, on the same weekend, took place during extraction, where the honey is put through a sieve overnight. 

The standard sieve is not sealed, so the bees found the honey overnight and many died, more honey was also lost. 

“At that point I’m thinking there must be something better than this,” she said. 

In response to these hard lessons, Ms Brunner has designed the Bee Buddy, a world-first inspection and extraction solution to make beekeeping safer and easier so more people can engage with the important and fascinating hobby. 

“There are no fit-for-purpose options available for the beekeeper to transport, process and store their full frames safely and securely, so I decided to make one for myself,” she said. 

"I just wanted one of these things myself. I didn’t set out to build a company." 

However, with the help of the Farmers2Founders program, she has done just that, including producing a prototype, and is in talks with manufactures. 

Ms Brunner launched Bee Buddy as a guest of the WA DIPRD and AgriStart delegation to Singapore for their Asia Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit in November last year.  

The Bee Buddy will make its Australian debut, supported by the Bee Industry Council of Western Australia, at evokeAg in February. 

eVoke Ag is Australia’s largest international AgriTech Conference linking Agrifood innovation in Australia and across the world. Attracting leaders, farmers, innovators, accelerators, researchers, universities, corporates, government and investors to one location for collaboration,  evokeAG. 2024 will be held on the 20-21 February 2024 in Perth, Western Australia.