Every year, the American Beef Federation (ABF) organizes its international congress.
Our friend Rich Morris, founder of Broodminder, invited us to present the prototype of Mellisphera to American beekeepers. With Rich and Theo, we met with beekeepers from Canada, the US and Mexico. In America professional beekeepers are called "commercial beekeepers" while amateurs are called "backyard beekeepers".
These exchanges allowed us to become aware of the similarity of the issues on our two continents: loss of productivity, very constrained environment, significant operating expenses ... The United States nevertheless has three characteristics of its own: the preponderance of pollination services, Huge farms of up to 6000 hives (everything is big at Uncle Sam's house!). Not to mention another factor of loss: the damage caused by bears.
We exchanged on beekeeping connected with the developers of HiveTracks and The B-App. These are two of the best known apiary management software in the business. 
On the conference side, presentations by Marla Spivak and other American researchers have been of great interest.
A highlight? The roundtable entitled "Hive Monitoring Technology: Fad or the Future? ". This was moderated by James Wilkes of HiveTracks, with participants such as Rafael Cabrera (Bee Solution) O'Keefe (O'Keefe Electronics), Jonathan Engelsma (Bee Informed Partnership) Brandon Hopkins (Enthomology United, Washington), Itai Kanot (BeeHero) and Rich Morris (Broodminder).
This second week of January clearly sets the scene for 2019: meetings of great intensity, many things added to our to-do-list ... Not to mention all that good time spent together with Broodminder!
