Bees For Life team

Isabelle Le Tellier, Raphael Willaert and Lionel Willaert took the initiative to launch the BEESFORLIFE project and create BeesForLifeasso. the BEESFORLIFE project and create BeesForLifeasso.

Each of them came to this biodiversity protection project by different routes. Isabelle is an ethological equestrian, passionate about nature and constantly observing her environment for the well-being of the animals. Raphael has always been a hobby beekeeper, a defender of bees, and as such is heavily involved in protecting pollinators. In all his professional activities, Lionel has sought to promote ecological and environmental approaches in the various agricultural production and food processing sectors.

Their meeting took place around new drone technologies combining thermal and visible imagery.This led to their first collaborative initiative in the field of early-season diagnosis of Asian hornet nests in the tree canopy. This collaboration has made it possible to co-finance artificial intelligence research at the University of Bordeaux (LaBRI).

In the course of this first project, it became clear that there was a need to fill a gap in the management facilities available to local authorities and institutions in relation to reporting and managing the process of destroying Asian hornet nests.

Their second area of cooperation wasthe development of a software package that has just been enhanced with new functions and has already been adopted by a number of local authorities.

These initiatives are being carried out within the legal framework of a pre-existing private company. These initiatives by the 3 partners pursue a goal of environmental protection that corresponds to the notion of a "mission" company, and in this context the 3 partners are not remunerated either in salary or dividends.

Through discussions with professionals and town councils, it became clear that the towns most concerned about protecting biodiversity wanted to have a a chemical-free solution for destroying nestsBeesForLife has designed a solution and filed a patent, published by the INPI at the beginning of January 2022, for the mechanical destruction of Asian hornet nests without the use of chemicals.

To date, the 3 partners have financed almost 80% of these initiatives from their own funds, with the other 20% coming from the Nouvelle Aquitaine Region, which has placed its trust in the 3 partners and recognised the quality of this work. The level of expenditure exceeds the personal financial capacities of the 3 partners, which are insufficient to continue the research work and the development and improvement of the BeesForLife software.

The projects developed and being developed are of general interest to the general public, and to enable them to contribute, the BeesForLifeAsso association has been set up with the following mission, among others:

- To enable private individuals, through the BeesForLifeAsso association, to contribute to these various biodiversity protection projects and also to ensure their collaborative dissemination;

A series of actions have been selected to help finance the projects in particular:

- Marketing the reporting software services to local authorities, insect controllers and private individuals;

- Testing the diagnostic solution for finding hornet nests in tree canopies, once a satisfactory level of performance has been achieved;

- Solicit public or private support in the form of grants or donations.

The speed at which projects progress will be directly linked to the level of funding that can be raised, within the framework of the rules of management and ethics that are monitored by the chartered accountant in charge of the accounts or the Ethics Committee of the BeesForLifeAsso Association, among others.