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.
