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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.
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.)
Well, with some additional plumbing you could make mead...
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_excluder