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!"

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Article Title

[kellyb9]

Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept

I'll admit... it's entirely possible that I don't understand the meaning of that word.

How Do You Prime/Put a Swarm Into This?

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:How Do You Prime/Put a Swarm Into This?

[Moryath]

A lot of good questions there.

I would presume that there's some form of service contract or services that can be purchased for things like "seeding" a new hive. What I'd be more worried about is the aspect of getting it cleaned out if you had a hive die-off due to infection or mites.

As for how bees select their hives... that's an oddity. I would guess that there was some unknown difference between your aunt's two hives - either in the genealogy of the bees themselves, or the location of the hive, like too much or too little shade compared to the other one. As you said, they can be fickle creatures. With the indoor/outdoor aspect, I'd be more worried about them getting fooled by the interior temperature during winter, and sending out all their scouts to die off in freezing temperatures.

In the other side though... you're about one 5-year-old with a baseball bat from having an angry swarm of bees in your apartment and a giant honey mess on the floor with this design. I don't know if that's such a great thought.

As a beekeper

[PhracturedBlue]

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.

Re:As a beekeper

[MancunianMaskMan]

As a fellow beekeeper, i'd go further and say this is utter BS. Like most of the "inhabitat" stuff, actually.

Re:As a beekeper

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a beekeeper for about 10 years. Had about 150 hives at my peak. I completely agree with you. How in the world are you supposed to maintain this thing? Its not like you can just scrape propolis off. That stuff is natures caulking! Also, there is no queen excluder, so you can't control where eggs are laid. This means the eggs with be in the center of the comb and spread radially. You probably won't have any comb that is just honey, so extraction without decimating the population will be nearly impossible. I suspect the person who designed this learned about bees by reading a Winey the Poo book.

Re:As a beekeper

[Anonymous Coward]

Also as a fellow beekeeper, there are so many things wrong with this system that I don't know where to start. Beekeeping is taking care of bees, and unless you can pull and inspect combs to deal with queen cells/aging queens/wax moths/mites/foul brood/cycling old comb/harvesting/collecting pollen?/oh dear god...

Let alone, keeping the bees room temperature during the winter encourages the hive to fly on cold days and kill itself.

Oh, and the weight of the hive will drastically increase and change over the course of the year. Where's the physical support?

And how would you get your bees into the hive in the first place? Not a large enough opening to dump a box of bees in. ...

*sigh*

Maybe not so much with the warmth.

[Slartibartfast]

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. ;-)

Re:Maybe not so much with the warmth.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bees actually do learn when there is food available and when there isn't. There are times in the San Joaquin Valley when it is a virtual desert for the bees. There's simply no forage for them at all. During this dearth the bees don't bother to send out foragers for food at all, just for water. They can tell the temperature outside and they won't fly outside to forage, just only quick enough to relieve themselves on a warm day. Having them indoors would help them get through the winter as long as you don't take their honey during that period. They wouldn't have to spend so much energy to keep warm and they'll still cluster. There's a lot of signals that tell the hive what to do. One of them is the length of the day. Shortening days tell the queen to slow down on egg laying and tell the workers to start getting the hive ready for the coming winter.

While the design is cool, I see a lot of potential for problems. Bees like their privacy. While there are observation hives, they have covers to block the light from entering the hive when it's not being observed. Bees don't like light entering the hive, period, and will most likely try to cover the glass with propolis in an attempt to block out the light. If they can't do that then there's a great potential for them to abscond. It needs a cover for when they're not being observed. Simply filtering light to the orange spectrum is not going to help them.

The article states that the hive will use some sort of foundation to guide the bees where to draw out comb. If the foundations are made out of plastic, and are not covered in a thin layer of wax, good luck in getting the bees to accept it. They'd rather draw out wonky comb where they want rather than use plastic foundation and that could mean that the glass gets covered with comb. To someone who really doesn't have any experience with bees, this means opening the hive to get that comb off the glass.

I could go on and on, but in so many ways this is so wrong and it shouldn't be done. I am a Beekeeper in California by the way. Bees should only be kept where they can be put a safe distance from people. Bees can become extremely defensive of their hives and the potential for getting stung rises with how close you are to the hive. If you're within 10 feet of the entrance, you're considered a participant and fair game for a sting.

as a non-beekeeper, WTF?

[Thud457]

NO , the bigger question is why we have more than four people claiming to be beekeepers on /.
That's a demographic, there.

Honey extraction not automatic

[Zinho]

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.

Illegal in most areas? Design flaws?

[RealSalmon]

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.

• --Last I checked, in most areas it is illegal to keep bees in equipment w/o *removable* frames. In looking at the equipment here, I'm not sure it meets that requirement.
• --Bees prefer to build their comb strait down, with the cell just slightly angled up. Among other things, this prevents gravity from taking its toll on the contents. The angle of the "frames" on this contraption do not allow for this.
• --The queen prefers darkness. All that exposure to light seems to me to be an unwelcome source of stress for her. If mama ain't happy . . . ain't nobody happy.
• --I simply don't think that there is enough room in this "hive" to house a healthy colony. They will quickly leave for a more suitable location.
• --The insides of hives do not stay sexy. All that gorgeous, new, white comb very quickly becomes dark and brittle (in the brood nest, anyway), and they tend to build burr comb in places you don't like.
• --Being able to drain honey from the hive whenever you may please . . . yeah, that's a good idea. In a hive this small (see above comment), they aren't going have enough room for surplus even if you never took a drop. They will starve in this thing over the winter . . . and probably over the summer too, depending on weather conditions. Again though, I doubt they will stay long enough for that to be an issue.