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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!"
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.
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.
eehhhmm... bees don't make honey from pollen. But you knew that already, didn't you?
Sig?
...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?
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.
There is a small flower pot in the front.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
I have several friends who keep bees, and they all have bee sting stories. It's a bit like a fish story; the winner is the guy who gets nailed the worst. First time I heard that I asked whether that made them want to give it up, and the response was pretty much, "Nah, I took a couple of benedryls and lay down for a twenty minutes and I was right as rain."
The punchline to these stories isn't that these guys went on keeping bees; it's that they kept taking the shortcuts that got them stung in the first place.
Obviously you're just a pussy who's not man enough to keep bees. Don't feel bad, so am I. But for men (and women) who have the figurative balls to keep bees, keeping them in the house would be cool.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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
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
I can't speak for others, but I'm man enough to keep bees.
But trust me - it's hell getting a collar onto the bastards!
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
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
until they've worked the bugs out.
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
I have one of these devices; it's called a refrigerator. Of course I raise roaches behind it instead of bees, but the concept is similar. Although the stuff the roaches produce isn't quite as good as honey. But my guests don't usually notice after the sixth beer.
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.