Not a beek, but I'm close friends with some, and might actually take the plunge this year.
This looks like a classic case of "automating the wrong way" and thinking in terms of agents instead of tools (force multipliers).
What beekeepers really benefit from are tools that let them do more work with less effort. Hive lifters are a perfect example [1]. The most popular design has a couple of mechanical flaws that can lead to buckling, and the hand winch is kind of a pain to use with really heavy supers. That's the real kind of innovation the field would benefit from.
Another is logistics. Schlepping around hive boxes, sugar water, tools, supplies, through loose farm mud, is a real hassle. Tractors are expensive and not really maneuverable. A "farm tug" would be crazy useful - something like an electric wheelbarrow (which exists) but a more generic/modular form factor.
It's one of the reasons I went full "topbarhive": no more lifting, dragging wooden boxes around and such. Less checking-up too, so overall much less work.
I'd like to add that bees, at least mine, have a thing against combustion engines. I think it's the vibration/shockwaves combined with the smoke.
So lawnmowers, bushwhackers, farm-tugs, chainsaws and such all need to be battery powered. Which is possible in 2022, but expensive. I've had to learn how to use an old-school scythe to keep my stand a bit nettle/grass free over the summer. Motor-mowing in my bee-suite, while being attacked by angree bees is not fun.
Not who you asked, but as someone interested in small/hobby farm equipment to enable a couple people to do more work, more efficiently:
The actual products seem nice and they have a variety of things that would be useful to us. I’d like to be able to buy a common flatbed lifting/dumping platform at about half those prices and be able to separately purchase and easily swap out the various wheelbarrow and garden/utility wagon bases.
Ability to upgrade/replace motor and batteries.
Ability to use the platform for additional powered implements like spreaders, seed drills, flail mower, auger, etc
I’d like to be able to operate it in either a push-in-front (wheelbarrow) or pull-behind (wagon) fashion and for the drive and steering controls to work well in both cases.
Stretch goals:
a low speed follow-me mode with basic obstacle detection/avoidance.
A go-to-programmed-location-and-come-back-wherever-here-is mode, optionally dumping or waiting for interaction at the other end.
The powered cart design? I'm not sure. I suppose there are some niche jobs that you could target with that. I think most farms set up to use a tractor with a front end loader or bobcat (which takes care of shoveling too), or gator/truck/atv for just hauling. I can see the powered cart being useful in small barns or niche chores, but only marginally (or for disabilities).
In general, I think low cost, low maintenance, and the ability to repair it yourself (lots of COTS parts) are the main benefits.
Interchangeable buckets/attachments would be good. What I mean is that I see a lot of outdoor or primary sector uses in the existing carts. Could be good to have the bucket of the wheelbarrow be interchangeable for the secondary or value-add steps. Many small farms need to vertically integrate to survive. So maybe have it focused on processing, like hauling, warming, and bottling (honey gate) that 100 gallon container this honey device uses. Or maybe for hauling mushroom bags from sterilization, to inoculation, to fruiting rooms.
Also, I assume many of the people using a powered wheelbarrow type device would find a loading aide/mechanism highly beneficial. Stuff like shoveling takes a long time and can be hard on the back.
So according to Google one Beehive can produce 20-30kg of honey per year. For the 24 beehives in this machine that would be 720kg of honey max, selling for around 10€ per kg in Germany. That would make a maximum of 7200€ in one year, while the machine costs 4800$/year plus 2000 for delivery in the first year. Additionally, the Beekeeper has to retrieve, package and sell the honey. I don't see this machine reaching profitability, even if it would mean no work whatsoever for the beekeeper.
Depending where I put my hives, I can make 30 to 60lbs of honey with my "100 year old wooden box" technology.
My ladies do not like "unnatural" (i.e. mostly plastic, metal) things. They will cover it with propolis quickly. They also do not seem to like electricity or odd magnetic fields, and things that constantly hum, like transformers.
The listed things that the robot supposedly is doing (feeding, watering, treat illness & pests, harvest honey, prevent swarming, splitting & combining) are very inconsistent depending on my queens, hive to hive. Much of it is done by the hive herself. The rest is so cheap to do, it is but an a few hours per year per hive.
It is not profitable to spend $57600/year for (looks like) 28 hives. It is also seems to be going the John Deere route with the equipment. No thank you.
And, the "bees are dying, the bees are dying!" is becoming tiresome.
Nice comments, but you're way off on the annual cost. It should be $400 x Beehome (24 beehives) x month, or $4,800 per year for 24 beehives. That's ~$200 per beehive per year.
True. $200 per hive is still high in my opinion. Close to half of expected revenue for local honey (50 lbs avg at $10/lb). Then you have additional costs like bottling, the treatment chemicals, packages to replace lost hives, etc.
"Alternatively, crop growers can buy their own hives and set them up permanently, eliminating the cost of rental and reducing the pressure on honeybees used for pollination services. However, this comes at its own cost. Growers need to maintain the beehives themselves or hire a beekeeper to do it."
It seems like this robot may be aimed at farmers who want their own hives for pollination purposes, but also don't want the burden of looking after them?
> Beekeepers also make money by renting out hives for pollination?
The sad things of those practices is that the hive is stressed by being moved around a lot, and that hives are often used to impollinate but after pesticides have been used thius killing the hive.
Maybe. The cost of this machine seems to still make contracting more feasible.
If it's a big monocrop place, then it probably still makes sense to contract pollination because you only need it for a short period during the year. You likely couldn't harvest any or much honey in the large monocrop fields because they would need that honey to support themselves the rest of the year when the monocrop is not flowering (or you'd heavily feed them).
Smaller places, like local orchards, could maybe benefit, but only if they're willing/able to process and sell their own honey. Many small places can currently partner with beekeepers for little to no money. In some cases, beekeepers will even pay the orchard owners (usually in honey) for being able to place the hives there. So maybe the orchard could make a little extra profit. But it seems this machine costs money on a yearly basis. This could create a huge liability if you have a bad year.
Whats more: big monocrop areas cannot sustain bees naturally. So they would die or become very unhealthy very fast.
Bees need consistent food supply for the entire season. Which is why contractors travel around. When they leave the plum-orchards, they travel to the next place where they are needed and bees can have food.
This is also the reason why "bees are dying". Apis Mellifara - the honeybee - isn't dying, we take good care of that. But many of the other insects are. Because monoculture cannot provide them food.
Farmers used to specially source areas of their land for this long ago. A plum-orchard would have at least 10% of land with flowers, brambles, etc. To keep a healthy, natural population of pollinators around.
Yes, my dad took the idea of a "tithe" and set aside 10% of the yard as "wild". Never touched it. I went into it a few times, but it always felt like a type of trespassing.
Wish this was more of a common practice, though I know the (short-term) economic incentives are against it.
More farmers are doing this. In The Netherlands, where I'm from, there are EU subsidies to help farmers cover these costs.
And all farmers I know gladly use this. They feel "forced" to go for highest, short-term economic incentives and forego all the 40+ year planning that farmers used to do. But they all know this long-term planning very well, because it's what their parents did in order to pass down the farms to the current generation. Many farmers know that what they do is bad in the long term, but cannot afford to turn around.
There obviously will always be farmers who then pocket the money and sow the cheapest stuff that checks all boxes for the subsidies. But many farmers feel releived that they are asked and rewarded to care for our communal nature.
Maybe. Usually they contract out pollination. The cost of this machine seems to still make that more feasible.
If it's a big monocrop place, then it probably still makes sense to contract pollination because you only need it for a short period during the year. You likely couldn't harvest any or much honey in the large monocrop fields because they would need that honey to support themselves the rest of the year when the monocrop is not flowering (or you'd heavily feed them).
Smaller places, like local orchards, could maybe benefit, but only if they're willing/able to process and sell their own honey. Many small places can currently partner with beekeepers for little to no money. In some cases, beekeepers will even pay the orchard owners (usually in honey) for being able to place the hives there. So maybe the orchard could make a little extra profit. But it seems this machine costs money on a yearly basis. This could create a huge liability if you have a bad year.
IMVHO the real point is another, that's just an experiment to see if and how we can change agriculture. The point is can we automate agriculture in a way to run on solar in a semi-autonomous way?
If so berry-picking robots, these etc are just test pilot. Surely so far they are too costly, as any new thing, but if they prove to be reliable and usable enough things might change.
We already have a certain dose of tech in agriculture but that's not good tech (cloud-bound by choice of the vendor, abusing the mean ignorance of their customers) but not something like "hey can we get rid of tractors and still be productive?", "can we farm poultry in automated fashion?", "can we harvest various crops in autonomous semi-self-sustainable ways?".
We are probably 20 years behind, but we must start from something in a world who really lack public research...
Raw material is hard to sell these days, due to covid, some countries try not to rely on lots of supply. Those material needs to be processed, package it up, put a cool story to it.
I think the concern with this is that it seems to treat the hive as a machine and not a variable natural system.
What does it do to bee evolution to take away their instincts and ability to self-regulate their hive ? What impact does that have on how the bees measure the inside and outside environment?
It would be interesting to know what the non-chemical mite treatments are. Most are mechanical, so I can only imagine it applies powdered sugar or removes drone brood or something?
I also hope it leaves a substantial mass of honey in the hive so the bees have sufficient sustenance over winter and into spring so sugar water is not needed.
There's already too much interference without understanding in the bee industry, automating things is only going to eventually reduce knowledge much further, but I can appreciate the goals and effort at least.
> What does it do to bee evolution to take away their instincts and ability to self-regulate their hive ? What impact does that have on how the bees measure the inside and outside environment?
Wouldn't this take at least a few centuries of continued use to actually change something via evolution? Unless all your bees are dead in 2 years, obviously.
A generation of bees is defined by the procreation of colonies / queens, not the life of individual worker bees, since they are eusocial. The queen bee lives for 3-4 years, and establishment of new colonies (swarming) can happen around once a year. I would guess 9 generations of bees would probably be 9 years at a minimum.
You are absolutely correct, unless the queen is actively managed by the beekeeper. Commercial beekeepers will have a queen for half that time, and then replace her.
A common symptom of today's society, thinking so short term.
Should we consider these systems are only in place for 10-20 years, are assume their use will grow so we certainly want to make sure we're not evolving less robust bees.
I mean a generation of bees takes atleast a year since only the queen is really reproducing, the worker bees themselves aren't exposed to any evolutionary pressure since they can't reproduce. (I guess they are by proxy, once their queen dies so does their lineage)
Although individual bees don’t live very long, all bees in a hive are from eggs laid by a single queen. So genetically a generation would be a hive. IIRC hives swarm (i.e. procreate) roughly once a year.
This doesn't look like it does anything robotically, but is rather is supposed to be a "better manmade hive" (e.g. with insulation and a semi-permeable membrane). I am not equipped to evaluate that claim, or if their manufacture/delivery goals are possible, so I would probably wait until someone else weighed in.
Indeed no robotics, but it has sensors to monitor the inside environment and detect swarming (a beekeeping friend of mine said it important to see that, because you would want to 'catch' the swarm). The honey collection is manual, but seems much easier then in current beehives.
Just to give an alternative modern take on beekeeping. The OP solution is only for people having 1000+ hives ;-)
And neither I have any knowledge nor intention to keep bees.
Video didn't show many of the aspects a beekeeper has to deal with.
"Beehomes use A.I. to identify when a colony could be preparing to swarm, and automatically prevents this event by adjusting conditions. Beekeepers can rest assured that the Beehome has their colonies stay put while they focus on other responsibilities."
doesn't sell it.
Bees are livestock, not programs. They sometimes decide that it's time to move on no matter what you do.
It doesn't show how inspections are done nor how many frames or frametypes are used. It doesn't show how frame rotation is done(necessary every few years) or what happens when you have a dead out.
How would you introduce a new queen or perform splits?
I'm also not sold on their "prevention"
> How does Beehome deal with pests?
>
> The ones that are visible with the naked eye, like Varroa, are detected by the robot in real-time, and treatment is applied accordingly. Others are identified by the damage they leave, and then treatment is applied accordingly.
> Does Beehome use/apply pesticides?
> No; the robot treats for pests using a heating mechanism. The robot heats frames to a point where it harms the pests (Varroa) but does not harm the bees’ brood.
I glanced over a paper on hyperthermic and I'd have concerns regarding nurse bee viability after being subjected to that temps, even if brood are not seeing mortality.
Meanwhile, we have extremely effective treatments for varroa that show little impact on brood/bees - See Randy Oliver.
I could go on and on but
tldr; This product handwaves away almost all of the work a beekeeper does without actually showing how it performs those tasks. I'd have extremely low confidence in it until a production length video of each aspect of a beekeepers job is produced and walked through with the Beewise.
> I'd have extremely low confidence in it until a production length video of each aspect of a beekeepers job is produced and walked through with the Beewise.
I know a bit about bee-keeping (did it with my father for ~15 years). I'd agree with you, but perhaps they don't feel ready to openly share too much, for fear of competition. Not a great idea, but this might be the reason why you don't see much in their material.
From what I'm reading, most of their IP is in the tech side. AI and other stuff.
Showing me how to clean, manage and use their product shouldn't be the secret sauce because they're otherwise relying on a quick market saturation before someone catches up.
first i've heard about hyperthermic, although i have anecdotally heard about benefits of increased humidity. any good links for readup on hyperthermic?
The reason why it doesn't see more uses is the difficulty to scale it(a beekeeper can't keep a device tied up for 2 hours when they've got 5,10,50,400 hives to manage.
The price tag is quite steep, but I really do love the idea and hope that more technology and thought is put into beekeeping. For anyone on the fence about raising bees, just do it - it was one of my favorite projects I've had the opportunity to participate in and is one of the most fascinating things to witness up close.
One of the arguments against domesticated honey bees is that they not only take food from but also spread disease to wild honey bee populations. The more diseased the domestic ated bees get the more hives keepers build to compensate, compounding the problem.
This is only partly true. And context matters a lot too.
For one, pollination causes better seed production. So better pollination, means more flowering plants, so more food for insects next season.
It's studied (I cannot find the paper, it was a German study, that's all I remember) where a very "poor" area (farmland and production-forests reclaimed as diverse nature) did had much more insects, much faster, on the side where honeybees were kept, than on the side where they weren't, due to the honeybees "creating" flowering plants for other insects to eat from too.
But I've also read a study from the Netherlands which is now often used by nature-management to ban honeybee-colonies from nature areas due to them competing against more endangered insects in those areas.
intrigued by question. i honestly do not know, but can add for context that it is not unheard of in my area (temperate woodland) to have a dozen or more hives cohabiting the same acre. of course the bees are not confined to the acre, but my point is, if competition were a concern, perhaps a counterpoint is how would so many hives in one acre be sustainable?
additionally, many of the colonies are from local swarms. granted, who knows what genetic backgrounds are, but they are "wild" in contemporary terms.
additionally, commercial operations make good money because there are too many flowering things to go around.
would be interested in hearing counterpoints to my counterpoints, genuinely intrigued by question & implications
How about enabling the bees to collectively walk their robotic bee hive around on its legs, kind of like how this goldfish controlled robot works -- "Just Keep Swimming":
>Tacocopter Aims To Deliver Tacos Using Unmanned Drone Helicopters
>(As for the worry that these tacocopters could eliminate delivery jobs: "I don't think that's what tacocopters really stand for," [Star] Simpson said. "But it's certainly the sort of robophobia we've lived with for a long time.")
> Such are the moving parts prone to jams and stuff like that.
They are probably prone to honey rather than jams. /jk
Actually the question I most want answered is about materials and environments -- I know hives can start in all sorts of things, but I am wondering about bee health (physical/social) in the context of metal and plastic.
Also their material preferences; do bees still need to be persuaded/cajoled to settle in an inorganic space when there might be wooden or brick structures in the vicinity?
Are commercial hives already well past this point and using metal and plastics?
Here in AU, most commercial hive operators are using very basic wooden hives - many aren't even using (metal) mesh bases, which are a common home-scale defence against things like Small Hive Beetle (SHB) because at scale it's a significant cost, both cap-ex and op-ex.
In 2015, the Flow Hive guys broke all kinds of kickstarter records with their plastic frame / externally-harvestable hive, though we've had plastic frames around for a lot longer than that. The bees don't seem to mind, but the only metric we have are 'do they stick around?'.
Given they're free to leave at any time if they don't like their home, that's a pretty reasonable measure.
Before varroa were identified as one of the key causal factors of colony collapse, there were questions around whether the natural wax foundation, with its regular, and perhaps slightly under-sized cells, were part of the problem. Same question with plastic foundation / frames. Empirical evidence suggests that the kinds of high-quality plastic that's used in beehives isn't, so far as we can tell, part of the problem.
I'd be surprised to find any commercial keepers using polystyrene. Migratory bee keeping is rough on equipment, and at scale I think woodenware still makes the most sense. I'm not in that community, but everything I see in Bee Culture and online looks like polystyrene is firmly in the hobbyist realm.
> Genuine question: are you within their target market? I guess only a commercial honey maker would be?
No just interested in the technical side of the product. Though I would love to buy one with some friends and run it if they would ever start selling to consumers.
When I was getting into commercial honey production on a small scale for my farm over the last year or so, I looked into Beewise quite closely. Unfortunately, they don't do small scale. From their FAQ:
> We currently cater exclusively to Commercial Beekeepers managing 1,000 beehives and above.
Is there a field of low tech, low impact robo-electro-wildlife caretaking ? if that make sense.
Instead of having large flattened areas that can be used with tractors, having more eco friendly natural spaces, with tiny roombas/rovers that can attends, surveil, monitor the state of things 24/7.
On a smaller scale why not. I attend the forest nearby at times, neighbors do it even more often .. but we can't ensure good care of a whole field set.
Even if there were large social efforts for people to gather and maintain nature, we'd still be at the mercy of pest / insects / microscopic life acting at night.
Im surprised this isnt getting the same level of push back as the flowhive did in bee keeping communities. The flowhive simply makes extracting honey easier, you can literally leave the flowhive on the brood box and pour out honey. Its very nice for someone who doesnt want to pull frames and use an extractor, which is tough work. People would say its not real bee keeping and worried about spreading problems to other colonies.
This "does" everything but I am confident it can't replace a real bee keeper somewhere in the chain. Ive had issues with hives that are unrelated to pests that have slowed down the production of brood, for example a new queen mated but never started laying eggs. Would this device notify the land owner of that? Most likely not.
The main criticism I remember of the flowhive was that it increases chances of infection and can destroy the cells of the frames. I have no experience with this hive, that's just the common criticisms I remember from the time.
Really cool - but this is not simple, is it? I mean, it is a really complex system if you think about it, down to the software even and cloud services.
I have no idea about beekeeping economies, could someone shed a bit of light here please? At $2000 shipping + $400/month it seems expensive, but it claims 24 colonies which seems like a lot, so how much does a colony produce per year? How much should it produce to make it worth this investment?
I assumed this would be a commercial application in the vast majority of cases, where I'm from we don't have a bee problem so it didn't occur to me that this could be setup from a charity just for the wellbeing of the bees.
Very interesting design but its scary that this could put a lot of people out of jobs. The risk and the talent that goes for bee keeping will soon be a novelity that machines can easily do. Its kinda scary. But this is a brilliant invention.
Why honeybees? It seems like of all the bees out there, honeybees get all the attention. In North America, wouldn't it be better to encourage bee keeping of the species that are native to the region?
Honey bees are the easiest to manage really. Some other bees are raised for pollination, but honey bees have a long history of management and semi-domestication. We already know how to raise and manage big colonies for migratory pollination.
I came to say something similar. If we stopped spraying everything with herbicide, pesticide, and fungicide we wouldn't have a pollinator problem. We need to stop trying to subdue mother nature to our will and work with her.
We need less people. As with livestock, the more of a crop or animal you pack into close proximity the higher the chance one disturbance or sickness wipes out everything which is what makes those chemicals a necessity. Unfortunately you can't feed this many peoples demand without superfarming.
Make less people, decrease demand, and if we aren't able to make less people we should make these people less wasteful and consumptive
> Unfortunately you can't feed this many peoples demand without superfarming.
There is a growing contingent of farmers proving this statement to be false by producing more on the same land with minimal use of fertilizer or biocides.
We are fucked anyways. In my area we just had no rain for more than a month (where usually there should be 12 rainy days) with basically drought coming - nobody even noticed, they were busy with more important things I guess
They are definitely an indication of where we're headed if it's been a trend. Is this the first dry March in a while or the dryest March in a series of gradual dryer ones over the poster's lifetime?
This looks like a classic case of "automating the wrong way" and thinking in terms of agents instead of tools (force multipliers).
What beekeepers really benefit from are tools that let them do more work with less effort. Hive lifters are a perfect example [1]. The most popular design has a couple of mechanical flaws that can lead to buckling, and the hand winch is kind of a pain to use with really heavy supers. That's the real kind of innovation the field would benefit from.
Another is logistics. Schlepping around hive boxes, sugar water, tools, supplies, through loose farm mud, is a real hassle. Tractors are expensive and not really maneuverable. A "farm tug" would be crazy useful - something like an electric wheelbarrow (which exists) but a more generic/modular form factor.
1 - https://beehivelifters.com/product/beehive-lifter-manual-2-w...