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Open Source Beehives Designed To Help Save Honeybee Colonies
Lemeowski writes "Honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate, with a third of U.S. honeybees vanishing last year. Since bees pollinate many fruits and vegetables, the disappearance of honeybees could cause the United States to lose $15 billion worth of crops, and even change the American diet. The honey bee disappearance is called Colony Collapse Disorder, a serious problem of bees abruptly leaving their hives. A new open source effort called the Open Source Beehives project hopes to help by creating "a mesh network of data-generating honey bee colonies for local, national, and international study of the causes and effects of Colony Collapse Disorder." Collaborators have created two beehive designs that can be downloaded for free and milled using a CNC machine, then filled with sensors to track bee colony health."
Why does no one ever give the full story about bees? There's only one species of bee suffering from colony collapse disorder(CCD) and that's been going on and written about since the 1800's so it's not a new thing.
The bees are following the dolphins back to their home planet. They don't like what we're doing here.
"Thanks for all the pollen."
-The Bees.
The salmon are getting pissed too, btw.
waiting Oh So long.
Open source isn't good enough. We need to have our freedom to use and modify all beehive-related data secured via Copyleft.
(joke)
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/an-insecticide-infection-connection-in-bee-colony-collapses/
http://action.sumofus.org/a/bayer-bees-lawsuit/
http://globalnews.ca/news/903394/the-plight-of-the-bees/
http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2013/private-letters-reveal-syngenta-and-bayers-furious-lobbying-against-bee-pesticide
Collaborators have created two beehive designs that can be downloaded for free and milled using a CNC machine, then filled with sensors to track bee colony health.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+build+a+beehive%3F
No CNC machine. Just some wood and glue. Want sensors? Add them. I'm actually surprised this didn't ask for 3D printers!
Perhaps, if you want to stop bees from dying, perhaps, just perhaps, ban systemic pesticides. Ban nicotinoids. Don't want to? Well, then don't bitch all all bees are killed off.
Smart Citizen reads like an off-the-shelf tool to aid the NSA. No thanks.
While commercial beekeepers have been having trouble with their bees, here in Florida we've had more wild bees than ever before. They're building hives in residential areas - in attics, in backyard trees, under manufactured homes, in walls of abandoned homes, etc. Commercial beekeepers don't want these bees because it's more expensive to test them to determine whether they are "Africanized" than to buy new, so they are usually killed by exterminators. If bees were truly as threatened as the headlines claim, wouldn't at least some beekeepers be collecting these hives instead of homeowners having to pay hundreds of dollars to have them killed?
The cause is known but for some reason some countries refuse to take the necessary action - ban the harmful pesticides, fungicides and stop over-working the bees.
Here in Britain we have a history of allowing poisons - MDF, air pollution, pesticides, Asbestos, trans-fats, BPA, a whole slew of nasty shit that are called food additives, if banning anything causes some company to lose money then it isn't banned.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/scientists-discover-another-cause-bee-deaths-and-its-really-bad-news.html
When bathing in a bath of poison, switching to a different bath design is not going to help.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
But the insecticide companies say there must be a different explanation, so that's settled then. A massive multinational chemical company wouldn't lie.
Basically, the problem is that beekeeping has a monoculture problem - watch the video at the end of this link which explains that basically the bees are not treated well and there's not really a diversity of managed bees.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
CEO researcher and campaigner David Sanchez said: “Although publicly calling for science-based decisions, industry's strategy is to attack scientists when science is not on their side.
Isn't that always the case?
I've become so cynical, if a business says that the sky is blue, I'm gonna look out the window. I consider them ALL liars until proven otherwise and if I can't find proof that they're telling the truth, then I default to liar(s).
Profit rules; people drools.
At first I was thinking about the design, and while I'm no expert I was immediately concerned about the "bee space" along some of the angled portions inside the hive, though it being a top bar design I'm not certain that's so much an issue. I do wonder about the sensor apparatus, as a key issue would be the ability to monitor sections of the hive much like the work done by Meitalovs et. al ("Automatic microclimate controlled beehive observation system.") It's been a bugger for me just to put any kind of sensor in a hive without it being covered in propolis, so I'd be interested to see what they plan on doing with the Arduino-based Smart Citizen Kit. But it seems like good intentions on these guys' parts, so kudos to them!
It's real simple: monoculture and chemicals -- agricultural chemical warfare.
Hobby beekeepers are not having this problem in the cities. It's the commercial guys out where the spray'n'pray farms are who are losing bees.
The only reason that *everyone* doesn't know this yet -- is because the makers of said chemicals (cough Monsanto cough and others) have heavily invested in creating confusion around the issue to hide the fact that it's THEIR PRODUCTS killing the bees.
There is nothing further to investigate. We don't need any goddamn sensors in the beehives. We don't need to spend any more tax dollars or time researching this. We need to start banning some shit. Now. Yesterday.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Why does no one ever give the full story about bees? There's only one species of bee suffering from colony collapse disorder(CCD) and that's been going on and written about since the 1800's so it's not a new thing.
While most of the colony collapse disorders affected the European Bumble Bees, other bees are also affected.
The culprit is the MITES, specifically the Varroa Mites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder#Varroa_mites
There is NO WAY to kill those mites without harming the bees, and the mites can evolve much faster than the bees, making them effectively immune to whatever chemical concoction that we use to kill them, while the bees can't cope with the same chemicals (when we use it inside the beehives)
Even the Asian bees, which groom themselves much thoroughly than the European Bumble Bees, are also affected by the goddamn mites !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Obligatory Fight Club reference:
worker bees can leave
even drones can fly away
the queen is their slave
With the world rapidly running out of straws to clutch what on earth are we going to have to fear? Without fear, we have no control. Personally I am afraid of revolution caused by lack of oppressive fear of stuff. Or am I just fearing....stuff?
Crop growers need bees. Beekeepers supply bees. When bees die, beekeepers make more. Maybe crop growers pay more and prices increase a little.
If pesticides on crops are killing bees, crop growers might have to decide whether they want the benefit of the pesticide at the cost of paying more for bees. It's probably not a hard calculation for them.
This is only "alarming" for drama people.
is that the people most affected by it - beekeepers and farmers who rent their colonies - aren't worked up over it. Colonies die off every winter, and always have. CCD means that more do, but replacing failed colonies is a routine part of the business.. The price of queen bees, which can apparently be produced on demand very quickly, hasn't gone up appreciably. The price of food that relies on rented bee colonies for pollination hasn't gone up appreciably. Almonds, one of the crops most sensitive to the availability of bees, have seen a price increase (attributable to increase cost of renting bee colonies) of less than 3 cents a pound.
CCD is a problem, but one that is well in hand. The only crisis is that there is taxpayer money that some researcher somewhere wants to do a study, and they haven't gotten it yet.
It's pesticides.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Seeing a lot of comments espousing the sentiment that we already know the answer, so this won't help. They each claim a different answer. Which one is having the most impact? Is it a combination? Is there something out there we are using that is doing damage we don't yet see? Are any proposed ideas problematic?
The fact is - more research always helps - so long as it is not taken as an excuse for inaction when known issues are present. Glad to see work is being done to further understand the problem, and I hope the diverse reasons cited in the comments for this article are taken seriously and addressed before it is too late.
It is weird we need to gather data to discover that insecticids kills insects, and that bees are insects.
I would consider helping, but I can just see this hive filling up with killer bees here in Texas and opening myself up for a law suit when someone gets attacked. And further, with the multitude of laws that have been past, is it even legal to own a hive without some kind of hugely expensive license today?
http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/ ...
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070182#authcontrib
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Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch's brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they're designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
"There's growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals," Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study's lead author, told Quartz.
Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the countryâ(TM)s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And thatâ(TM)s not just a west coast problemâ"California supplies 80% of the worldâ(TM)s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
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This has been so obvious for many many years to the organic faring community... It is just another negative externality of conventional farming practice, and another example of market failure to account for systemic risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162375-whos-killing-the-bees-new-study-implicates-virtually-every-facet-of-modern-farming
In general, safety studies are almost never done (including for human health) on *combinations* of chemicals (including human medicines). And studies of health effects of individual chemical's health affects often ignore secondary, tertiary, and further breakdown products.
The future of agriculture is probably indoors powered by cheap electricity (from fusion and solar) and managed by robots (including probably pollination).
http://www.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/issues/farm-indoors.htm
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHA
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"monsanto treats seeds with systemic insecticide"
Problem is CCD happens on organic farms and in countries where neonicotinoids are banned. In Australia, and large parts of Canada where these insecticides are widely used they DON'T have CCD.
The fact of the matter is that this is a witch hunt, and lots of innocents are being burnt on no reliable evidence.
But what the heck. Science be damned we KNOW it's the fault of some greedy company somewhere.
...thing takes on a much less catastrophic feel when you recognize that honeybees are an INVASIVE SPECIES, and that this continent was perfectly-well vegetated without them.
-Styopa
Great post - thanks. This is what makes Slashdot such a great site.
Anybody else notice that the decline in bees is directly proportional to the proliferation of cellular networks and other electromagnetic interference?
Resonance Beings of Frequency
Simple experiment: put the base of a cordless phone in the hive and presto - instant collapse.
I'll just go down to my shop and use my Northwood dual table CNC router and start milling right away. Oh wait, sold that business a decade ago. Never mind. I know! I'll just go ask my neighbor to borrow their CNC router for a few hours..... Darn. I asked my neighbor to use their CNC router and he called the police. He also looked scared and confused. Maybe I need to ask a beekeeper since obviously the project is aimed at beekeepers who all seem to have CNC machines.
Sometimes the maker community can be dumber than a bag of hammers. If they want a simple open source beehive then sit down with a few good episodes of The New Yankee Workshop and draw up plans someone can download in PDF and follow using a minimal amount of power and hand tools. Many people have power tools and easy access to cheap woodworking tools at home improvement centers. Hell many people already have basic woodworking tools they bought for home improvement projects or to build that table they always wanted to build but never get around to. Most of the work can be done using hand tools. A router should be the most expensive tool needed. The electronics should be bundled as a kit and come pre assembled ready for installation.
Its a nice design but not enough people will be interested if the CNC part sits between them and a hive. Some will say then find a shop with a CNC and they will do it for you. You could but I bet that shop will charge you a nice "affordable" hourly machine rate and possibly charge for setup and tooling. If they think the design needs to be so complex a CNC is needed then sell the thing as a knocked down kit like Ikea. Might be a little costly but that is when you realize its a stupid idea and that people have been making beehives out of wood by hand for years.
I'm not sure if these are equipped with wireless transmitters, but "mesh network" sounds like it. I think that's a pretty bad idea. Wireless communication is one possible culprit for this thing. There's some evidence that these signals are disrupting a whole lot of plant life, for instance, and bees are pretty nuts with their quantum dance they do, the magnetic fields they sense and create. If you're going to put wireless transmission on these, maybe run a cable to a hundred feet away and use directional antennas. I suppose you could do controls without the wireless gear, but I would bet that the colonies with internet hubs broadcasting in their midst are not going to do so well. :) Seriously.
Oh, post right above me just pointed this out. Beat me to it. :)
Except for the fact that bees are shipped globally now. Always working, eventually a few of them hit a red light district, well you know the result of that. The question is, why the f are bees allowed to be transported globally? Yes globally, Australia to the U.S., U.S. to China and back again, U.S. to S. America and back again. WTF? People pretend it's just a local guy with a few hives that are being affected. No, once again it's mega corporations doing the damage. Once again it's not good enough to make a decent living, no we have to f.ing corner the market, destroy the little guy. Like all things in this "global economy" it's gotten out of hand. Sometimes things shouldn't be transported around the world multiple times every year and expect to stay healthy. Bees are one of them.
Yeah, but to be fair, a lot of our crops aren't entirely native to this continent either.
That is not how beehives are made. I should know, I grew up as the son of a beekeeper. It is the "CNC milling" part in this initiative that may make it fail. Beekeepers have other things to do, and are often too money-stretched, than to invest in such equipment.
Thing is, already 35 years ago the first waves of Varroa mite swept over Europe and killed a bazillion beehives all over the continent. And we still don't have any insight into what CCD exactly is, what combination of factors it is caused by, what factors favorize it. We just and only gained some insight into how Varroa spreads. Apis carnica has hard times ahead...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I have hardly seen any wild bee this summer. Once I have seen tenths of them every day. How did you translate an abundance of bees in your particular area to "wild bees not disappearing"?
I'm sure the bees don't care if the hive is GPL licensed or not :(
And if they do, do they actually agree with the terms?
Folks, check out hivetool.net and hivetool.org. We've been putting sensors in hives for about three years - have about 15 on-line in the southeast US and California. We desperately need DBAs and programmers to help with some of the software tools. I work for a commercial beekeeper in the southeast US. We run about 2000 hives. Last fall we had our first experience with colony collapse. A brief description can bee seen at hivetool.org/cc When you troubleshoot a system that was working, whether it's hardware or software, the first thing you do is undo the last thing you did. In this case it could be the introduction of Neonicitinoids. The EU has banned them for a few years. This is similar legislation in the US: The save the American Pollinators Act of 2013, HR 2692 This is a real problem that is starting to affect the food supply - seen the the price of almonds this year? And yes, we probably have seen this before in the late 1800s- only it was called Disappearing Disease or Dwindling Off. Guess what insecticide was used then?
I have not noticed this. We have a yard at the base of a cell phone tower used by 4 carriers - no problems. I've been putting old desktop MBs under hives for about 3 years, complete with switch mode power supplies and hard drives, some with Wi-Fi, some with ethernet - no problems. I think what you are referring to was one poorly designed experiment where the cordless phone base was placed in the hive. If it did cause the hive to collapse, it was probably the magnetic field from the transformer in the base, not the RF.
There are drug company representatives (Bayer, Monsanto) behind some of the "pesticides are almost certainly fucking things up" reports:
http://www.setac.org/resource/resmgr/publications_and_resources/executivesummarypollinators_.pdf?hhSearchTerms=SETAC+and+Pellston+and+Workshop
Of course, maybe their boss' boss' boss doesn't know about this yet, which is why they're still in a job.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
the disappearance of honeybees could cause the United States to lose $15 billion worth of crops
That's of course the main thing we should worry about: the US losing money...
my local beekeepers that i know from farmers markets are having no colony collapse
the bees die after being carted around from field to field with pesticides.
gee.... how would you feel if your house were put on a flatbed and taken down highways to varied and poisonous realestate?
1. Yet another save the planet cause. - Check
2. Open source. - Check
3. Excessively convoluted "solution" incorporating lots of completely impractical style. - Check
4. Completely impractical result does little or nothing to address the issue(see 1.). - Check
5. Unjustifiable feel-good backslapping and self congratulatory self promotion. - Check
Let's get real. There is no need for "open source" beehive plans. Beehives are extremely simple boxes and frames and the plans are already widely and freely available, if you couldn't figure it out yourself in 2 minutes.
Plywood? Even with linseed oil, that ain't gonna last.
A CNC machine to make a beehive? Really?!
How many people, more than one, are actually required to make a beehive?
How long did this ONE beehive take to make?
How does one transport(you know you need to move the hive around, right?) multiples of these open source hives?
This entire thing is stupid hipster horseshit. You wanna be a beekeeper, start here or here. You wanna bee a hipster, go to Starbuck, ya douche.
The summary states that a third of honeybees vanished last year. While this is correct, it is misleading. Bees are lost every year, usually over the winter. This is normal. From TFA: "Annual losses from the winter of 2006-2011 averaged about 33 percent each year, with a third of these losses attributed to CCD by beekeepers." So, only a third of the losses are attributed to CCD. The other two thirds are normal losses. CCD is a serious problem, but it is not as huge as the summary makes it out to be.
Proverbs 21:19
It's too farfetched to think that industrial farming and the use of GM modification in plants to imbed pesticides might actually have COLLATERAL DAMAGE?
However, I think we need a citation for this widespread proof you are seeing. There's not a lot of places anymore where there are no GM crops which are likely more a key player than the pesticides.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I'm covered in bees!
also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlctsjhIy30
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When saving the world, or at least saving the world's bees, one must maximize bee colony growth and production/reproduction. That means keeping them warm or at least from freezing, keeping them fed, maintaining some diversity, protecting them from predators/pests and disease, and more. Most, if not all, of these things is best facilitated by moving the hives.
Maximizing production requires moving hives. You do want to save the world, don't you?
I could be mistaken, but i remember hearing somewhere that scientists discovered the cause of this problem. Something to do with a small worm that was incubating in their brains and as it grew larger and more mature it would literally drive the bee insane. The bee would then fly away from the hive to die as its brain was being reamed out by this parasite.
I could be entirely mistaken, but that's what I heard.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
No, it is not farfetched to think there might be problems with any particular artifact of technology. Everything you do in life has positives and negatives.
However it is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE to just go and place blame on something for a problem without having any real evidence, and in fact in the presence of evidence to the contrary.
This is exactly what happened during the Salem witch trials. It's what happened to vaccines and why we are now getting measles outbreaks in he US when measles used to be considered eradicated.
There is a process to finding a right answer. We know what that process is. But NOoooOOOoo. Just because we have some preconceived idea that GMO is bad we go and blame it for any and all perceived ills WITHOUT having evidence that it is indeed the source of the problem.
This sort of crap is what leads to the scientific frauds perpetrated by people like Seralini and Wakefield.
Sorry, but you can't run a technological civilization like that.
If you are going to behave like that you might as well ban fire and go back to living in dark unheated caves and eating your food raw.
How do you think honey bees got the US in the first place?
THEY ARE NOT NATIVE.
The Pilgrims brought them. They have been shipped globally for FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.
No native American plants require bees for pollination.
Crikey how about some basic knowledge people.
Bayer doesn't care much about pesticides. Monsanto would prefer you buy their bullshit-ready genetically modified seeds, which oddly enough could be a good future movement: plants modified to be more resistant to pests, rather than simply poisonous or coated in poison. Faster growth, harder stems, and softer leaves would attract pests to the leaves rather than the fruit.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
:P
rmzzzzzzzzzzzz
No native American plants require honey bees for pollination..
Many native American plants require do require bees for pollination but the imported (and possibly undocumented) European bees just don't do the job.
--
See Native Bees of North America: http://bugguide.net/node/view/475348
No brain, no pain.
Evidence that in 2010 alone, over the Ohio skies, there was dumped more than 4,000 tons of aluminum, sprayed into the atmosphere for various projects including a net of electronic protection from the powereful sun's radiation that is a problem for the aeronautics electronics and a plethora of others excuses. Maybe, researchers should start there. My water supplier has told me they are not even required to test for aluminum in the water they supply everyone. I have heard politicians stating that aluminum is benign in the environment and I am pretty sure that was not true or scientifically researched. It is a scientific fact that aluminum affects the synopses of normal human brain function even leading to diseases such as Alzheimers and Dementia. Perhaps, the bees are forgetting what used to come natural to them for their own natural habitat's survival because of the pollutants purposely being dumped in OUR skies.
Sorry, but it's crap:
* Uses plywood instead of wood that's naturally resistant to water and insects, line white pine (pinus strobus)
* That build wastes a huge sheet of wood instead of starting with small pieces. That's a waste
* Need for CNC
* Insanely complex build
* Angled roof, resulting in bad support for the hive
* No room to extend the hive to harvest honey
* No immediately obvious way to access the hive from below
** No way to check on bees to see if they are all right
** No way to deploy stuff that kills varroa destructor
There's a German non-profit called Bienenkiste.de (literally "bee box"). It's a simply, sturdy design that went through over a decade of improvements and incorporates feedback from professionals. Honey yield is 1/2-1/3 of that what the same hive would get with traditional hives, but they are a lot less work and the bees are in a more natural state. This means that the bees are so relaxed, I can do all my work on the hive without smoke or protective equipment.
http://www.bienenkiste.de/doku/bauanleitung/ for instructions. Translate into English, the pictures and videos should be largely self-explanatory.
I want to be bee