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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!
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.
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 lazy is inherently bad, why exactly? I'd bet it's great for the bees as they aren't wasting precious energy making wax. (It takes several times the weight of honey to produce an equivalent measure of wax.) And just because these cells have honey in them doesn't mean the bees aren't keeping honey elsewhere in the hive.
cat sig >
Sorry, but what? Pretty much every technological advance we've ever made has been about someone being lazy.
So, tell you what, stop using the wheel, the lever, an engine, electricity, refrigeration, or pretty much anything which takes the work out for you.
Stop being such a lazy bastard and ignore all modern progress which reduces your labor.
Otherwise you're full of crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Dude. If there is honey left over. Don't worry, about cleaning. The bees will take care of it.
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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.
No you keep the queen confined to a smaller part of the hive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_excluder
She's substantially bigger than the drones, so something as 'simple' as a gate would work. large enough for drones, too small for the queen.
In addition, I'd imagine that a cell with larva in it wouldn't drain.
I don't read AC A human right
Aside from not being good for the bees, there are a bunch of other problems I can think of, even assuming the whole thing isn't another crowdfunding scam (a la hoverboards and solar roadways) and works as advertised.
1. The system can't be cheap.
2. There's no way it can drain all the honey from the hive. I'd be extremely surprised if it got even 50%. Most of the honey is going to remain in the comb and stick to the tubes. There's no way you could flush that out without ruining the honey.
3. Commercial honey extraction involves multiple centrifuging and filtering steps to get a nice clear consistency. Crystal-clear honey on tap sounds dubious.
4. What happens to the hive after extraction? Bees produce honey cells and cap them with wax. This system apparently drains the honey from behind, without uncapping. Great, but then you're left with a bunch of half-full combs that the bees won't touch again. Seems like you'd have to remove the combs from the hive and uncap 'the old-fashioned way' anyway if you want the bees to keep producing.
I can't imagine this system being useful for anything other than small-scale, one-off, hobbyist honey production. And, again, that's assuming it works as advertised.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
RTFA would answer several of your questions.
1. $600 for box + 8 frames
2. It's gravity fed, so it'll all flow down eventually.
3. It's gravity fed, so it'll all flow down eventually.
4. The bees notice & refill.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Is the average middle-class person "working less hard" than 50 years ago? Not at all.
Have you been on social media websites during the work day?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Beekeeping is not a typical endeavour easily analysed by simple economic theories, The large scale farms that produce most of the world's honey are already using low cost, well-trained labour and will never take up a hobby item like this. Anyone who keeps a few hives does not do it for efficiency of production, they do it for the wonderful connection between human and bee, Bees are such good insects they are practically honorary mammals. There is a peace and a joy to be had by caring for and gently harvesting a modest proportion of the harvest of these amazing and beautiful little creatures.
Yes, some beekeepers use a queen excluder. But they can cause problems. For example, worker bees, which can pass through the excluder, move eggs around all the time. So if they move an egg across the excluder into an area where the queen cannot spread her supression pheromone, the workers may decide to raise a new queen on the "wrong" side of the excluder. Also, you have the issue of worker-laid eggs which make up about 10% of all the eggs laid in a hive. If the queen pheromone is not stong enough in the "excluded" part of the hive, those worker eggs will be raised as queens.
Nobody who raises bees only opens their hive twice a year. Once is enough to harvest honey. And honey can be harvested when the hive is opened for other reasons. So the reduction in work is miniscule and comes at a great cost in terms of equipment cost. Also, the exposure of honey on the tap is very dangerous to the hive because it will attract all kinds of parasites and bee preditors. Yellow jackets and Japanese hornets will be drawn to the honey and will end up attacking the hive.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It's an American thing
And anyway, given how the device works, the concept that baby bees if present are going to flow out doesn't sound realistic. The device robs honey by opening up a small rift in the plastic comb that honey can slowly trickle through. Unless we're talking microscopic baby bees here, I can't see them passing through with the honey.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.