In defense of people involved, all may not be as it seems, although I am afraid it could be.  Gordy is a friend of mine and I have been following the Megabee story from the start.  Even before the start, actually.

I recall, early on, there was talk about applying for patents to prevent others less principled  from doing so and defending the beekeepers rights to use all the variations, so I don't want to judge.  Perhaps that is the goal behind the applications, but we have no assurances.

I am concerned if these commonplace concepts are indeed patented and patentable.  The applications are not just US patents; they are also international.   Additionally, new people have become involved and are marketing the product..  I have no clear idea to whom the patents would be licensed if they were granted and what a licencee might decide to do.   

A licencee's goals could as easily be maximizing profit as opposed to helping the beekeepers keep costs down, and a patent would help limit competition by intimidation or enforcement.  Anyone sitting on top of virtually all the practical feed formulations and processes would be in a strong position to extract tribute.

As said before, much of the time, effort and expense that went into MegaBee was specifically to develop a liquid bee feed.  Solid, patty formulations had been somewhat perfected previously and beekeepers have been quite happy feeding brewers yeast, sometimes mixed with soy and getting good results.  That is not to say that improvements are not possible, but there is a commercial incentive to cheapen the product as much as to improve it when selling proprietary products in order to maximize profits.  We have reports that Megabee is a good feed, but some conflicting information as to how good and if it is any better than cheaper alternatives.

Sadly, we have had a problem with each of the various protein products formulators that we encouraged to start up since we did our test back around the turn of the century.  At that time, w approached a number of scientists to work with us to develop an "open source" formula, and several decide that they saw a gold mine and set off to develop proprietary products.  In some cases, we all benefited, but in one case, the developer made unscientific and unsubstantiated attacks on all other feeds and muddied the water.

At any rate, I think that we are better off now than we were a decade ago because we have far more choice.  I'm hoping that development in the bee feed business will not be throttled by any one firm getting a patent on ideas which have long been around and are in use to varying degrees for decades.

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