14-12-2012, 10:44 PM
...something new comes along which is a really neat idea...
I keep bees. In winter, bees go into a huddle to keep warm - a sort of ball intersected by the frames of the brood box - think of it like an orange which has been sliced into sheets then reassembled. In the middle of the huddle is the queen and the workers sort of "convect" from the outside to the inside then back again so everyone stays warm.
The ball moves around inside the brood box, travelling as winter passes over the stored food supplies.
During winter, beekeepers never touch their hives - if you open a hive on a cold day, the cold can kill them - you never know what the state of the colony is until you open them up again in spring. Open the box, and who knows?
A sort of "Schroedinger's Bees" (if you know what I'm referring to!)
This state of affairs IRKS me
I don't like not knowing, so I set about making a small & cheap thermal imaging camera from first principles. This is harder than you might think, as the normal silicon sensors found in webcams etc. are not nearly sensitive enough to detect the subtle change in the outside temperature of a beehive - a change that would indicate an active colony, and moreover, where in the box they were...
As far as I know, this has never been done for bees. I was happily progressing with this project when I discovered that an open source project had beaten me to it, and very elegantly at that.
The project is on Kickstarter - a great mechanism that is used to "crowd fund" interesting projects - see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andy...-accessory for the project I'm helping to fund...
The home page of the designer (Andy Rawson) is at http://www.rhworkshop.com/
Lovely, elegant, design. The sort of project I love!
I keep bees. In winter, bees go into a huddle to keep warm - a sort of ball intersected by the frames of the brood box - think of it like an orange which has been sliced into sheets then reassembled. In the middle of the huddle is the queen and the workers sort of "convect" from the outside to the inside then back again so everyone stays warm.
The ball moves around inside the brood box, travelling as winter passes over the stored food supplies.
During winter, beekeepers never touch their hives - if you open a hive on a cold day, the cold can kill them - you never know what the state of the colony is until you open them up again in spring. Open the box, and who knows?
A sort of "Schroedinger's Bees" (if you know what I'm referring to!)
This state of affairs IRKS me
I don't like not knowing, so I set about making a small & cheap thermal imaging camera from first principles. This is harder than you might think, as the normal silicon sensors found in webcams etc. are not nearly sensitive enough to detect the subtle change in the outside temperature of a beehive - a change that would indicate an active colony, and moreover, where in the box they were...As far as I know, this has never been done for bees. I was happily progressing with this project when I discovered that an open source project had beaten me to it, and very elegantly at that.
The project is on Kickstarter - a great mechanism that is used to "crowd fund" interesting projects - see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andy...-accessory for the project I'm helping to fund...
The home page of the designer (Andy Rawson) is at http://www.rhworkshop.com/
Lovely, elegant, design. The sort of project I love!
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