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this is an episode with me talking about the upcoming crowdfunding campaign that I will be doing. we get into how outdated bee hives are, how sensors can impact beekeeping, the bees, and bee research. I am focused on making beekeeping user friendly. And remove the confusion that it entails.
Kickstarter pre-launch info link
https://monolyths.kickoffpages.com/
- Sign up, share, it’s really easy
- How I built the Tesla of Honey Bee Hives
- Why Should You Care about Technology in Beekeeping?
- 40% of Honey Bees died last winter, This is what I am doing to help Bees Everywhere
- Technology In Beekeeping: What I am developing and seeking funding for
Table of Contents
- Tesla of Beekeeping
- Path to a working prototype
- Connecting it to the grid
- Power supply
Tesla of Beekeeping
I love technology when it’s used to solve real world problems. A good example of this is the Tesla electric vehicle, which has the main purpose “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Besides the environmental impact, they also will save tens of thousands of drivers’ lives each year. They use technology to help with climate change, pollution, and hazardous driving conditions.
They inspired me to set out to build a smart hive system to accelerate the beekeeping world to be one where the phrase “I don’t know” is banished to antiquity.
Using first principles I wanted to build was an all-in-one smart hive that monitors and watches many different signs to help figure out the health of the hive anytime, anywhere, and to make “I don’t know” a thing of the past.
I cannot tell you how often over the years someone has told me I’m wrong. That what I wanted to create is not possible.Well, guess what? They were wrong. I built it.
I kept reading about how autonomous cars, like Tesla, were going to save lives, and so I wanted to use similar machine learning and technology approaches to bear against the many bee problems.
Tesla and Elon are famous for using first principles to break things down to simple components and then build them back up. I use the same strategy here.
Tesla Tech + Beekeeping Tech = ? Tell me what you think that mash-up would look like. Or subscribe to my newsletter for unique before-launch peaks at what I’ve built to see my vision.
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Take-Aways
- Raspberry Pi + sensors and monitoring technology + next gen hive = Crude Prototype.
- Wood is bad. Metal with special insulation will protect against extreme weather.
- Wifi /IoT lets us connect the hive to the cloud and thus our phones.
- Tech needs energy, we will meet these needs through solar & rechargeable batteries.
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Working Prototype
Through my digging, and acceleration through my podcast, I’ve met great scientists that helped me in understanding the problems on a deeper level in gathering valuable data that can influence researchers and beekeepers around the world.
This led me to design a prototype with Raspberry Pi centered monitoring and sensory systems to see what is going on at any time via my phone or web browser.
The end goal is probably not to use Raspberry pi tech, but first principles made it’s cheapness and basic effectiveness as a prototype hard to beat.
From there, I looked into advanced insulation materials to see about improving the old, cheap wood design.
Turns out, it doesn’t take much to improve upon that.
Also, wood has a moisture holding problem that is suspected to be a major cause of hive loss in winter. (read more here on winterizing problems for bees)
Needless to say, I quickly saw the advantages of using metal over wood, with additional insulation running inside the walls.
This creates an environment unrivaled in modern beekeeping that turns a bee hive into a bee home, which is lighter, stronger, and overall better for the bees.
This creates an environment unrivaled in modern beekeeping that turns a bee hive into a bee home
Connection
Imagine living through the 2018s winter again in a wooden box huddled together with your family and friends like penguins.
In my homeland of Northern Illinois, it got as cold as Antarctica. Sounds horrible!
Keeping with this scenario, if you needed help, you would want to be able to contact someone right away.
I looked at many different ways to connect the hive to the grid, so we can access it anywhere.
The easiest solution is to add wifi for the local backyard use and/or IoT technology for remote location monitoring.
Either of these basically allow you to sync up what’s going on in your Ask Smart Hive to be able to know what’s going on in real time, anywhere. The figure to the right shows visually how it works.
Power
With all of this technology in place, being able to power it was the next challenge.
Additionally, I believe in keeping with the theme of doing things right vs quick, easy, or cheap.
From silly to serious:
- Nuclear Power (a bit overkill)
- Hydro power (hives near running water)
- Cord to house (cords, and doesn’t help with remote)
- Batteries (would need to be rechargeable /recyclable)
- Solar (concerns about places without a lot of sun)
I quickly decided on a combination of solar power and rechargeable batteries with the option for physical hook-up. It can be expensive, but overall better for the environment, the bees, and is easy on bees, beekeepers, bee researchers alike.
Picture of solar power + beehive = decentralized