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Inventors Revolutionize Beekeeping
wombatmobile writes For more than 5,000 years, apiarists donned protective suits and lit bundles of grass to subdue swarms of angry bees while they robbed their hives of precious, golden honey. Now two Australian inventors have made harvesting honey as easy as turning a tap — literally. Cedar Anderson and his father Stuart have just been rewarded for a decades worth of inventing and refining with a $2 million overnight success on Indiegogo. Their Flow Hive coopts bees to produce honey in plastic cells that can be drained and restored by turning a handle, leaving the bees in situ and freeing apiarists from hours of smoke filled danger time every day.
Nuff said.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Thought they were going to revolutionize beerkeeping.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
oh, forget it. i thought you were going to steal my bearkeeping thunder.
But can the frame size fit in a standard 1U data center rack space?
Because every hipster with roof access bought a hive - but there's only so much bee food available in the city.
Though a lot of cheaper honey ends up in plastic containers anyway, I try to buy it in glass jars (or wrapped in paper).
Will keeping it in "plastic cells" from the very beginning — before it is even harvested — not affect the taste at all?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
First of all, for a beekeeper, it is not just smoking the bees to kill time. It is an important part of the whole ritual of being a beekeeper. Infact, most keepers I know don't wear suits, or do so in rare instances. The smoking also is optional, if you know what you are doing.
Second of all, this can't be good for the bees. I have read research articles that pointed out that square shaped boxes caused the bees not be as productive as how bee hives are in their natural habitats. So, putting them in plastic containers and just churning out the honey seems like the lazy ass way of beekeeping.
--SK
A lot of beekeepers have expressed their opinions about this, though some are more simple speculations than suitable arguments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.honeybeesuite.com/s...
The patent for this device can be found here http://www.freepatentsonline.c...
The biggest issue I have is the issues for pest mitigation. Small Hive Beetles could conceivably thrive in this device with some of the crevices created. However, it may be possible to incorporate an oil trap or some other measure.
What people seem to identify as being the biggest issue is the marketing towards ease of honey retrieval, don't need to really deal with the bees at all. That's certainly the biggest misnomer when talking to people about starting a beehive: It's all about the honey! It certainly isn't, and takes a lot more effort than a newcomer might expect. As one person identified: I'll take a look at this when people start selling their used Flow hives 6 months from now (due to too much work, no quick turnaround of honey profit, etc.)
And it looked a lot sexier:
http://inhabitat.com/philips-unveils-sexy-concept-bee-keeping-gadget/
Still Good on 'em :)
"No Jim, I use a bad apiarist."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGKbwN8Ceew
I am a bee keeper. Harvesting the honey is the lest of the work and the most enjoyable part. If they could find a way to automatically get invading pests/parasites and fungi out of the hives it would be a revolution. This will just make people who should not have bees get them and that will make the threat to the bees even bigger.
What about the larvae, don't they live in the same cells, will they be squashed ?
I've been beekeeping for 6 years. I fear this device will create more bee-havers instead of bee-keepers. Bee-havers are bad for apiculture because they do not inspect the bees enough (or in some cases, at all). They do not identify issues with the bees that can spread to other hives miles away. The hives tend to die within two years due to varroa mites and the wax moths and other pests take over, become numerous and spread to other locations. This leaves us who do tend to our bees to have to deal with a larger quantity of invaders than we normally would. My bees will find these hives and raid them, bringing additional mites back to our hives and throwing off the calculations I use to track mite progress and treatment dates. Two years ago i had to deal with an insane amount of wax moths attempting to infest everything we had with any wax in it due to a local beekeeper losing their bees and leaving the empty hives in a field for a a year. Any time frames or a honey super came off a hive it had to immediately be wrapped in the plastic wrap used in shipping pallets in order to keep them out. It added alot of work and expense to the process.
What danger is there supposed to be?
How will the notion of capitalism fair if the workers are deprived of the fruits of their labor? Will the bees fail to gather honey? How about supply and demand. As the bees are forced to labor to support humans as well as other bees the demand side goes way up but the supply side remains fixed. And with this new system is it a true trickle down, honey economy?
This is a lot of fuss over bee vomit.
This is a scam. I've personally seen the hive, and it's all simply magic tricks underneath. The tap is physically connected to a large container of store-bought honey that's conveniently hidden within the hive for purposes of making a video.
This is great. We as a planet need more bee tenders.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Although it would break with Slashdot tradition, I wish the complainers would read the fucking article. This product is designed to address ONE of the problems/duties associated with bee keeping.
The promoters clearly advise anyone without bee keeping experience to contact and join a bee keeping club if they don't know what they're doing. They clearly state that the hives will also have to be inspected for diseases, pests etc, but that's not the specific problem this product is designed to solve.
Is there any impact on the bees from exposure to the plastic cells, is there any alteration of flavor of the honey from plastic cells, similar to that of a drinking from a plastic cup alters the flavor of soda or water?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
But not enough that I don't think this is cool.
1) Full supers are *heavy*.
2) They don't lie: between the capping knife, the extractor, cleanup, needing to keep everything bee-tight... it's a bit of a pain.
While the joy of going through "the process," and getting honey in the end, is damn rewarding, I have to say that it's also a Hell of a lot of work. While I think there are legitimate concerns for this product, it strikes me that "I don't like it because it's not the way I'm used to" is probably not a good argument. I used to use bee escapes, which certainly made life easier, but it was still the single most impacting element of keeping a hive. That being said, a lot has changed since I kept bees (CCD, mites, etc.), so I'm unsure what the long-term impact of this would be.
Sorry but this is ridiculous. For one thing, taking care of bees involves moving frames around for many reasons other than collection of honey. So you are not going to create a hive that never has to be opened. Honey collection is not the main reason for opening a hive.
And bees to NOT obligingly lay their eggs only in the brood frames. There will be eggs, and thus baby bees in the honey section as well, so when you turn the tap you will get baby bees.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Wild bees have largely been dying out (at least, stateside), probably in no small part due to the pests described. Varroa mites, which are a relatively new nuisance, can have a dramatic impact on unmaintained hives.
It happens that I was just watching an episode of How Things Are Made about honey production on the Sci channel, and that said that bee frames were invented circa 1900, and before that harvesting honey meant killing all the bees.
Would be breeding a better bee. One that is more resistant to mites, insecticides, wax moths, etc., and that isn't so susceptible to CCD.
And also perhaps more efficient at pollenization. For example, the mason bee is supposedly a more efficient pollenizer than honeybees and will work in bad weather.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
These guys generally won't sting either.
--PM
Besides easier harvesting, their method produces honey without the wax honeycomb.
Their frames are stacks of nearly complete hexagonal tubes which bees only finish off with wax, instead of building the entire chamber out of it.
As wax production uses up more energy than honey production, bees will produce more honey, more often.
It remains to be seen, but I am guessing that this will increase the number of harvest per year, possibly doubling them if there is enough food for the bees.
No wax, or nearly no wax, means that the honey does not need to be thermally treated or strained to get the honey out of the wax.
And that's a huge deal for the quality AND MORE IMPORTANTLY for the PERCEIVED quality.
Ever heard that nonsense about how you should not be eating honey with a metal spoon, because evil?
Honey strainers and extractors are made of what now?
You may not be able to get the woo out of the people's heads, but you can at least profit from it while remaining HONEST.
And no... It is not the metallic taste.
It's the old pewter cutlery which contained LEAD which in turn caused people to get sick from using metallic eating utensils.
That "folk wisdom" still goes around, centuries later, despite becoming obsolete centuries ago.
Another effect is that they report a stronger aroma - as less of it is lost in the wax and thermal treatment.
It is a higher quality, premium honey, of which there is more being produced, more often.
Maybe it will finally become cheap enough that we won't have to worry if it is 100% the real thing or is there some HFCS added in to "make more of it".
http://youtu.be/AF-kkb9jG1A
This must be the first summary I've read on /. in over a dozen years that wasn't just a copy-pasted paragraph from the article. Kudos for that.
On the other hand, I didn't much like the slant (which must be popular in the post-modern, green, politically-correct, think-of-everything-little, brave new world) of the first sentence.
Hell yeah, I'm gonna prune that sucker of a peach tree in my back yard (or as you may prefer to put it: rob it of of it's precious, verdant, aspiring fire wood) despite the fact that peach trees grow just fine without pruning. Why? So that it can bear more precious, fragrant, soft, juicy fruit, of which I will rob it too. That's the whole point of planting a tree in my back yard (instead of burning fossil fuels to travel to some place thousands of miles away that has wild trees, just to collect a few.)
Oh, and please get off my precious green lawn while you're at it.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
It's always funny to watch ./ comments on a subject domain outside of computers. Could you even imagine that everything you've learned about node.js might not equip you to make credible inferences about beekeeping?
The summary of this piece is full of breathless hyperbole and is mostly unrelated to the actual experience of beekeeping, whether by the hobbyist or the professional.
If you check out their Indigogo campaign, you'll note that the projected delivery date for the equipment, which is certainly going to slip badly from here given how overfunded they are, comes too late in 2015 to be useful for harvesting honey this season, at least in North America. So we're not going to have a popular consensus of the pros and cons of this thing until mid-2016.
Oh, and hey, did anyone mention that you typically don't harvest any honey in the first year you have your hive? So for any beginners starting out with this thing, you won't get to try it until 2017.
I've still got the one Langstroth out there, it would be interesting to give it a go (the rest are all Top Bar now). Kudos to the comment on how you'll be able to pick up a secondhand unit cheap for the disillusioned!
A good thing if it helps boot up some new mindful beekeepers, yes. But a revolution? Give me a way to bet my actual money against that one, please.
For some plastic? Fuck that.