Solar-powered robotic beekeeping
beewise.ag
beewise.ag
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...
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Found an interesting article:
https://theconversation.com/the-farmer-wants-a-hive-inside-t...
To quote:
"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?
Interestingly enough, across the Midwest US, beekeepers tend to give farmers a case of honey if the farmers allow them to put bee hives on their land.
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.
It happens very often, sadly.
Smaller local farms and beekeepers can work together without these problems and without having to move hives, or at least not very often.
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.
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.
Wish this was more of a common practice, though I know the (short-term) economic incentives are against it.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
So I'm not sure why bees couldn't have some minor changes within a year. But I'm also skeptical that's inherently a bad thing.
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.
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 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.
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.
> Bees are livestock, not programs.
And, having two top-bar hives is not the same as having six apiaries each with hundreds of hives.
One big thing I see as an issue - how does this handle palletization for moving hives across the country?
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.
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.
I mostly use oxalic acid, but if heat treating becomes viable I'd welcome it on the hobbyist scale.
When there are only so many flowers to go around, keeping bees might just be a disguised way to destroy natural bees.
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
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.
It's nature. It depends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GDgmP1ac_A
Or less bee-enabling and more bee-exploitive:
BeeCopter is TacoCopter for Honey: delivering hive-fresh honey to your picnic or garden breakfast table by flying in live bee hives via drones!
>On the East Coast? Try LobsterCopter -- "Taco Of The East!"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tacocopter-startup-delivers-t...
>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.")
> We currently cater exclusively to Commercial Beekeepers managing 1,000 beehives and above.
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.
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?
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.
Ah, this one was really juicy!
> We currently cater exclusively to Commercial Beekeepers managing 1,000 beehives and above.
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.
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.
[1] https://robomechjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s4...
ps: I was also thinking about monitoring fungi, microbes etc. (and the usual temp, humidity, acidity)
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.
https://horizontalhive.com/how-to-build/layens-beehive-desig...
2. A well maintained hive can easily double in size over a single season ($150).
3. A hive can easily produce 25 lbs of honey in a single season ($125 wholesale, or $250+ direct).
If it can really manage 24 colonies extremely well, $16 per colony per month is NOTHING.
Make less people, decrease demand, and if we aren't able to make less people we should make these people less wasteful and consumptive
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.