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Gadget Allows You to Keep Bees In Your Apartment
greenrainbow writes "Philips just unveiled a new concept for an urban beehive that would allow anyone to become an amateur bee keeper – even those who live in apartments with no backyards. Best of all you pull a little string and all the fresh honey you want comes out. Hopefully no bees come with it!"
I mean, really. Seems perfectly reasonable.
At most, all the fresh honey contained therein will come out. This may be less than all the fresh honey I want.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
is this a /. troll?
Don't them bees need flowers to make honey?
Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept
I'll admit... it's entirely possible that I don't understand the meaning of that word.
I'm not a beekeeper but my aunt had a couple hive boxes that she kept year round. One had a hive that stayed around but the other had a problem of dying off or swarming and moving away (despite the fact that we treated each box exactly the same and packed them with hay bails just before winter). Once she captured a hive with a nuc and successfully moved it into the failing hive box but it didn't last long. This minimalist design appears to solve the warmth issue (by keeping it on the inside of your home) but what happens when your swarm moves or your queen dies and there's no brood to create a new hive? Is there a method to repopulating these things?
Also, does anyone know if bees select their hives based on locality to fields and nectar sources? From my aunt's experiences, bees seem to be fickle creatures and will readily leave due to inattentive keepers. I imagine a lot of these things would just end up empty.
One more concern is that the small aperture on the outside might be subject to blockage by freezing rain, ice or snow and in the picture it looks like it would be hard to remedy that.
My work here is dung.
I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.
Not the bees! Ah my eyes!!!
http://boards.4chan.org/b/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If we feed this honey to dogs will they be dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How do the bees breath??
So... it's Christmas, you have your entire family over, Uncle Pete is drunk again... doing his rendition of Grandma got ran over by a rain deer... trips of your sons new dump truck, reaches up to balance himself and pulls the entire hive down and crushes it under his drunken body as your relatives look on in horror. There's about a 3 second pause before you hear a single slurred word from Uncle Pete: "Owe... I think I gots bit er somthin... *gurgle*" the room erupts in screaming as people start climbing over each other trying to get to the door. Queue the Monty Python music, you'd better hope Santa brings you some calamine lotion.
Now if something happens and shatters the glass, not only do you have to clean up broken glass but deal with an angry swarm of bees in your apartment. Bet these things would be a hoot in earthquake prone areas.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Now have a look outside of that window. Where would the bees go to collect the pollen?
"Could I drill a hole in one of your expensive windows so I can install a beehive in my apartment? You wouldn't have any problem with me leaving a hole in the window when I move or having stinging insects swarming around there either, right?"
Very pretty, very functional. Now, rig this thing to fall off and smash when there's movement in the room in the small hours, and we've got a perfect burglar alarm. If you were attacked in the dark by a swarm of angry bees, the whole street would hear you screaming!
And then there are the health benefits. Even if it didn't dissuade any burglars, it'd make you think long and hard about those 3am fridge raids...
...next time we hear about this, it'll be a news story on how terribly this actually works.
I seriously can not see this ending well.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
What kind of landlord is going to allow a tenant to cut a hole in a window? Furthermore, if you live in any sort of modern urban high rise - modern being something built in the last 50 years, your windows are not single panes of glass but multiple panes with inert gasses in between and special coatings on each pane. In fact, they aren't even called windows anymore, they are exterior glazings and they are expensive. They are not like dual-pane windows for your suburban home. If something accidentally crashes through your home window and falls to the ground, it will not fall very far and it will land on your own property. That is not the case in an urban high rise and the answer, from a liability standpoint, is to make it really really really hard to send objects through the "window".
Asking someone to cut a hole so you can install a beehive is going to result in laughter.
But that's not to say it would end well for either of us.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I was not interested in owning this device until I read your post.
You have to cut a hole into your window glass to hang the thing. If your landlord allows that, you probably already have all the insects you need.
How does breeding more bees solve the problem of having too many son's of bees in most cities?
More importantly (and more seriously), this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. And no landlord is going to like you cutting holes in your windowpanes (yes, I read the original press release, not just the stupid article).
Seems it would also violate rules against the number of "pets" you're allowed to have. Also, the honey produced in an urban setting would probably have too many contaminants to be healthy.
Tenant: So that no pets/animals, policy, does it apply to goldfish? ....
Landlord: Goldfish are fine.
Tenant: How about an "Urban Beehive?"
Landlord: No!
Tenant: It's safe. The bees are
Landlord: No!
Is it April the 1st already?!
A hive that doesn't winter well is a sickly hive; something's wrong. A hive that's kept warm all winter, I'd actually have huge concerns about: the bees' metabolism would kick into gear: they'd both need more food, and (likely) need to clean the hive. The first would be... interesting to implement, the second would almost certainly be impossible with temperatures near or below freezing. (Bees really don't like to be out in temps below the mid 50's.)
Bees don't leave due to inattentive keepers; they leave only when something is incredibly stressful in their environment -- not enough to forage from (though that's almost inconceivable in most locales, including cities), or -- far more likely -- persistent pestering by skunks, raccoons, etc. They seem to have no problem trying to get some honey for themselves in the middle of the night. There are two ways bees leave a hive: swarming, which is really just when the hive is large enough to branch out, and absconding, which is Bad News, and almost always due to environmental factors.
And, yes, I was a beekeeper. ;-)
I can't imagine the bees will be happy to have their diurnal rhythm screwed up by having their hive interior irregularly lit at night from room lighting.
Comb generally doesn't mix the two. Larvae and honey are usually stored in separate locations. That being said, I have no idea how "pulling the string" would be able to differentiate. I imagine, however, that a strainer of some sort could keep most of the unpleasantness away. That being said, "as a fellow beekeeper," I, too, am with MancunianMaskMan: I just don't see how this could reasonably be expected to work, especially in cooler locales, where they'd be wintering in a room-temperature environment.
NO , the bigger question is why we have more than four people claiming to be beekeepers on /.
That's a demographic, there.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
BEES!!!
giggity
If you look at the Phillips Urban Beehive page you'll see that the pull cord is simply a smoke release, not a honey extractor. Even with the smoke, I wouldn't want to be running beekeeping operations in my kitchen. In fact, I'd be willing to say that the only purpose of this design is decorative, not functional: it's for people that just want to look at bees and feel good about being "close to nature" in their homes. I'll let the beekeepers on the forum take care of the rest of the design's flaws, they've already got it covered.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
welcome our sexy, urban dwelling, bee swarm overlords
Anyone else old enough to remember Nickerson Farms restaurants?
They had something like this in every one.
You can't be serious...
1. Bee's are very messy creatures. That several-inch gap between the comb and glass will be filled with new comb built by the bee's, don't plan on being able to see much. Bee's don't like open space, they will build comb until it reaches the glass and they have about a 3/8" space to crawl through.
2. Honey is typically extracted by centripetal force. Frames which contain honey are taken out of the hive, the caps sealing the honey need to be cut off with a heated knife, and the frame is spun to get the honey out. Not all comb is honey, much of it is brood (developing bees), something a human would need to separate out.
3. It mentions there is a place to smoke the bee's if it needs cleaning. Bee's who have been smoked WILL fly all over your house. Bee's react to smoke because in nature it means there is a fire and that the hive is about to be destroyed, so the Bee's gorge on honey in anticipation of having to evacuate. They are heavily distracted from other threats but will continue to fly around.
4. I won't even get started about what would happen if this thing broke.
This device strikes me as completely ridiculous. I would NEVER consider keeping bee's in something like this, it seems apparent the designer has never kept bee's before. It resembles a fish tank, not a bee hive.
it is a concept after all, so some of it's shortcomings might be obvious to apiarist that aren't to the industrial designer who came up with the concept.
from a non-beekeeper perspective, some things seem lacking:
ingress/egress opening looks too small for proper venting... don't drones need larger openings in the summer to fan cooler air into the hive?
mechanism for extracting honey probably is destroying cells to release honey... wouldn't the bees build around this mechanism after a few uses?
i thought queens needed a special chamber
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Maybe the beekeeper in this ad isn't the only thing blowing smoke.
Chuck Norris doesn't eat honey. He chews bees.
honey as a sweetener and go for something more humane, sustainable, and less likely to fill the kitchen with bees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agave_nectar
you might also solve this problem in the process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollinator_decline
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'd rather have a gadget to do exactly the opposite. That is, keep bees far away from my domicile.
(not the inverse, which would turn my domicile into a massive beehive...{shiver}).
-Turkey
The second I see one of these in my apartment complex is the second I confront my landlord (and possibly, look for another place to live.)
I thought bees lived in dogs not hives.
I mean how else are you gonna get those dogs that shoot bees out their mouths.
It's covered in bees!
Half of this is in fact possible, and is already being done and has been for decades...its called an "observation hive". Glass on at least one side, sits inside where it can be seen, a tube through a wall lets the bees get outside, so on and so forth. Google can tell you all about them.
The "pull a string for honey" part, however, and at least in my opinion, is total nonsense. Bees are not going to deposit the honey in a convenient comb-free location. And simply squeezing honey out of the comb would be a good way to also squeeze bees and larva.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Will it blend?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is insect puke we are talking about, here. Raw and unfiltered. Revolting.
All you need to do is give the bees an escape route, plastic tubes are used all the time for indoor hives.
Problem is, hive maintenance is a PITA. Beehives need to be maintained, they are not automatic by the bees, the wax buildup in a active hive will become huge if you dont harvest it regularly.
Any fool with some wood, plexiglass and PVC pipe can make an indoor hive.. BUT, if you dont maintain it and help them swarm to new hives, they will find a way to expand outside your hive and int your home. Bees can eat through wood and plaster quite easily.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is technology. something which you can see in your neighbor's wall someday in future. The fact that it is not information technology doesnt make it less technology, leave aside 'idle'.
Read radical news here
... Tomorrow, my garment-sleeves!!!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I love this idea and it does work when done correctly. Imagine the ant farm you had as a kid. Now replace the ants with bees. Now make it so the whole thing doesn't die after a month. That's what you have when this is done correctly!
Like many slashdotters (apparently) I am a beekeeper. I go a step closer to this particular type of insanity though in that I construct hives similar to what this article features. Well, actually not that similar because mine actually work and this one is wrong in more than a few ways. I've constructed a few that didn't work and I've made some that do work and from my failures I can tell you that the following things are wrong with this design:
1) The hive is stationary and it is inside of your house.
Expecting the caretaker to work on the hive inside of their house is a bad idea. For this to work the hive must have the ability to be taken outside
2) Releasing calming smoke into the hive.
This is just a bad idea. In a hive as small as this smoke does little good and releasing smoke in the wrong area of the hive actually has the opposite effect.
3) Pull a cord to collect honey.
I could see this working actually, the queen will only lay eggs in cells with specific properties so having a spring or something with a cord attached to it could allow a pull of that cord to release honey to drip down. Unfortunately that drip would be covered in bees attempting to repair the damage within seconds. The larger problem is that the few cells that were damaged to retrieve this honey would not be immediately filled, it would take a few weeks to be able to pull the cord again to get honey.
5) Allow in orange light so the bees can see.
What? Seriously? The bees prefer a dark hive, no light. They communicate by scent and touch. Tinted glass allows us to see the bees, not allowing the bees to see each other. The glass isn't a problem though, bees do fine in a glass hive as long as they are not in direct sunlight and they can still find their way out of the hive by walking towards the brightest source of light they can see.
There are more problems but I can forgive the rest because this is an artistic representation of a sexy design. An observation hive in your house is great and it works well with little maintenance when done correctly and this hive may convince some to give it a try.
I'm less interested in why we have beekeepers, and more interested in how one becomes one. Is there some education you pursue? Did you decide on it as a career, or get to it by happenstance? Did you always love bees, or did you wake up one day and think, "I want to herd bees!" How hard is the business aspect of it? Is it your main business, or were you already a farmer and this is just a supplement?
I realize some of these sound flippant; I'm sorry. It's such a foreign thing, and yet pretty cool. I doubt I'll ever be one, as my wife is terrified of bees, but the intricacies of bee tending are, apparently, more than I realized, and it's pretty intriguing. :D
yeah -- that's gonna make your landlord happy....
Damn hipsters caused colony collapse order.
Also, this proves that bees have ESP, since they knew about this before it happened and started dying of malaise .
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In an interview with a beekeeper:
http://www.design.philips.com/shared/assets/design_assets/pdf/portfolio/qa_beehive.pdf
It may also help to understand the way in which Phillips is pushing ideas like this. They're an exploration of ideas more than attempts to bring products to market.
http://www.design.philips.com/about/design/designportfolio/design_futures/design_probes/index.page
Why is everyone bashing this thing as if it's something available in the real world?
It's a drawing somewhere and obviously won't work as drawn, but that's the point of concepts, you start eliminating the flaws before you start prototyping something physical.
until they've worked the bugs out.
As a beekeeper I have to say that this is the most ridiculous thing I've seen. There are so many issues wrong with this that it's absurd.
I've had observation hives (here's one example) in my home. Some work pretty well, others not so well. Take my word for it, this one won't.
I am an avid beekeeper (yes, yet another on /. . . . very odd we have so many here). This thing looks all kinds of screwy to me. There a are quite a number of design flaws on this thing, of which a very small sample follows.
-B
Is Zoolander working for Phillips now?
http://www.design.philips.com/shared/assets/design_assets/pdf/portfolio/qa_beehive.pdf
one of the links on the official Phillips page, features a quick QA with an actual beekeeper. So, on the one hand, they DO seem aware of some of the potential problems. On the other hand, that was really short, and the beekeeper didn't sound totally enthused. So it also sounds like Phillips may be a little ignorant of beekeeping (as many beekeepers have posted) and may be missing some of the bigger problems involved.
I actually knew a professor who kept bees "in" his office. OK, not really. He had a regular white box style hive just outside his window. It was on the first floor so it was easy to keep the bees in a conventional manor. He couldn't see into the hive but he could see them coming and going. It was the bee equivalent of watching fish in an acquarium.
If your apartment has a balcony, problem solved. Maybe the fire escape too; but that probably violates code. How about using a window A/C mount? Then you just rapel down the side of the building in a bee suit.... hehheh.
Oh, and aside from all the flaws the beekeepers pointed out, you're not getting "clover honey" or "lavender honey" or "mountain wildflower honey" here. Would anybody want "soda that somebody left in the dumpster honey"? That seems to be the primary attractant for most of the urban bees I've seen. You get the bonus of GMO HFCS processed through a bee that scavenged a rat infested dumpster. Ummmm! That's good urban honey.
I thought it was condiment?
Hmm... what goes good on white bearded clam?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
the yuppies' espresso maker.
---
A yuppy and his money are soon centrifuged.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
I forgot to mention that one of the rules for having a hive is that you must be able to remove the combs to inspect them for disease. If it can't be inspected it is illegal to have. Looking through the glass is unacceptable. If this thing gets foulbrood it's done.
For people allergic to bees one sting can kill. And someone is advocating putting them into an urban apartment setting with all those people around? Somebody's bound to be allergic!
My dad was a high school biology teacher. He also kept bees. For several years, he kept a glass sided demonstration hive in his classroom. It was wood and glass, rather than the plastic this is.
He had a tube through the window that the bees could enter and leave through. The classroom wasn't on the ground floor, and that way there wasn't a problem with nearby pedestrians and the bees.
Was a nice relief from the usual in a high school class. Instead of just stuffed or formaldehyded specimens, you had living creatures on display.
I'm also a beekeeper who hasn't posted before. My friends in my beekeeping club all visit slashdot regularly.
Also, my name is Dwight Schrute
Roast beef?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Great, now I'm limited to the areas of my apartment where the beehive is NOT between me and the front door. I'll miss my recliner... and the second floor.
"all the fresh honey you want comes out" never mind that the bees need to eat or they die. IMHO as a backyard beekeeper this setup could get messy real fast.
Seriously. Is our need to keep animals imprisoned in our home so great that now bees are the latest pet du jour?
I saw this right after it was posted, but didn't have time to organize and type all of the reasons this won't work. Having kept bees for years (yes, another one!) there are numerous problems with a design like this -- but all I can think of (and a few I haven't) have already been mentioned. /.
I'm mostly just posting to add to the numbers of this previously unsuspected demographic on
So, you come home drunk one night. You lurch towards the window to get some air and, as you do so, you bump clumsily into the hive breaking it open. The bees, sensing that something is very wrong, attack the intruder.....
*** Don't be dull.***
"Condom fart"
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Bees don't keep the hive warm. Bees keep the *cluster* warm. At the center, it's near the temps you describe (which is where the queen hangs out); the fringes are considerably colder. The hive, itself, is probably several degrees above ambient, but it sure the hell ain't in the 80's. So, yeah, I completely disagree. ;-) If their metabolism were anything like it is in the summer, they would live the six-odd weeks that is the usual lifetime for a worker. As it is, wintering bees can see close to six months. And your bigger problem than sending out foragers (quick way to stop that: put in a screen) would be to clean the hive. Bees are pretty darn tidy creatures. But only when they can get *rid* of waste material. Lowered metabolism means not much waste during the wintering; a complete metabolism for four months of hive confinement would be a no good way to have things work; expect to see dysentery (yes, bees can get it) or worse in such circumstances.
This correction comes up so much I'm pretty sure it's part of the troll. Good work, nice and subtle.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I, for one, like the idea of encouraging urban food production. Surely the issues will be solved soon by some smart cookie. And then newer, more powerful versions will be introduced. I, personally, am waiting for the "deer colony in your apartment" edition. Pull a string and out comes some tasty venison! Yum!
"attaches to a hole cut into a pane of glass." convince the building owner to let you cut a hole in the glass and, if you live multiple stories above ground fl., to hang from the side of the building in order to affix the outer section. security deposit
Today I learnt that Slashdot has an unusually large number of beekeepers.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
Oh please beehive :)
Seriously?! I would be curious as to how that would actually work and serve a useful purpose for people. Is there a way for the bees to go outside for nectar and pollen, etc.? Is there a way to ensure that the bees get to keep some of that honey you release with a string, since that's their food source? Would people actually be able to get enough honey to make it a reasonable item to own? It's certainly an interesting idea.
I'm a small scale beekeeper (12 hives) and I have had "observation hives" for a few years as well. They are hard to keep alive because most designs, including the one pictured in this article, have too small of a brood nest and lack storage area for reducing ample nectar into honey. (it takes about 8 pounds of nectar to reduce into 1 pound of honey!) Also, as mentioned by previous posters, the heat this hive will receive during the Winter will most likely be its downfall. Bees "cluster" during the Winter and the queen shuts down brood production to reserve resources. The heat may likely confuse the hive which will have them burning more energy and quite probably starving in the middle of Winter or during any slight Summer dearth periods of no nectar availability.
In addition, this hive would only be legal in countries where "skep" beekeeping is legal and the United States is no such place. State inspectors need removable frames for health inspections and the fines can be severe.
I love bees and I am 100% in favor of increasing beekeeping but in this case I say it borders on being inhumane. The bees are at a HUGE disadvantage in that hive design and I would bet against their survival of even one season, over-wintering. Put a hive on the roof of your building and give the girls a fighting chance!
SoMDBeekeeeper
Hives with removable frames are
required to permit the inspection of
hives for bee diseases and not
just the new scourge killing hives
all over the nations.
It has been common for years to
have "visible" hives inside connected to the
outside by a tube.
Since bees return to the hive at night it is
easy as pie to plug the entrance move
them inside attach the pipe and watch
the fun. Adding clear plastic to the
side is also easy to do.
Still this is a sexy looking product.
Having bees entering a second story
window is also cool as folk do not walk
in front of the flyway.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
When I was in the US I learnt fairly quickly that "subtle" has a subtly (in the US sense) different meaning over there.
All that effort to make you urban "Green" life perfect, and now you have to go back to single pane windows to commune with the Bee's. Fail.