Part 2 (part 1 here)
Table of Contents
-
Tesla of Beekeeping
- Path to a working prototype
- Connecting it to the grid
- Power supply
- Why should you care?
- 20 Billion dollars of our food is produced through aid of bees
- Half of bees die each year, and we don’t know why
- Education, equipment, trial and error, and bees cost a lot of time and $$$$$
- Final thoughts and a call for help
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
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
Why should you care?
Quick takeaways
- 20 Billion dollars of our food is produced through aid of bees
- Half of bees die each year, and we don’t know why
- Education, equipment, trial and error, and bees cost a lot of time and $$$$$
- final
Let’s start with why you should care.
+20 billion in food
Like you and myself, we need to eat pretty much every day, and honey bees help produce a third of our food!
The types of food they produce are the types that taste and look the best and are pretty good for you as well.
I’m talking about apples, peaches, melons, lemons, limes, cherries, strawberries, and about 20 billion dollars worth of other foods in the U.S. alone. That’s huge!
I bet each of you reading this has a favorite honey bee pollinated food that wouldn’t exist without them. My favorite are strawberries which I make into delicious smoothies with just the right amount of honey added. (see picture for example)
(Respond back with your favorite bee pollinated food, or see the complete list here.)
Half of Bees Die
Honey Bees are in trouble. About half of the population die off each year. Half!
And these problems have been progressively getting worse year after year for decades.
Many of us, probably including you, the person reading this, have a love for bees, a deep desire to contribute and make a difference, and a calling to get into beekeeping.
We all want to do our part to help keep bees alive, as healthy as possible, and support locally grown food.
Education
The current state-of-the-art hive technology has been “state-of-the-art” for almost a century.
You think we would start with buying equipment (related to this image), where I’d show you what currently exists and contrast it to what I’ve built, but that isn’t what I’m going to do. To completely understand what I’ve built, you need to first understand the extended process a beekeeper goes through just to get ready to take care of their own bees.
If you were talking about getting a dog, finding where to get the dog and supplies from would be the first step. All told, you could do a good job at being a dog owner with under a month of preparation (i.e. training, courses, etc). This is not the case with honey bees. They take time, energy, and $$$$$.
Back to beekeeping. I wanted to be a beekeeper for years before starting on the path to becoming one. I imagined how it would feel to take care of them. I could not wait!
But, before I let myself buy them, I, and others like me, started by taking online and local courses, finding a mentor, and reading as many books as I could get my hands on.
All of this was just to get the basics out of the way, which can take years to complete.
I didn’t (and don’t) want to harm the bees or do something wrong.
An experienced beekeeper, with all of this under their belt, can crack open their hive, look in it, and subconsciously know dozens of things that equal the state and health of their hive. This takes time, education, and experience. Even with all of that going for them, they still lose many hives and walk away not knowing why.
Even with all of that going for them they still lose many hives and walk away not knowing why
Equipment
After navigating the path of education, you’re now ready to buy and install. Here are a list cheap beekeeping beginner kits. After buying this, the nuc or package of bees (including queen), and installing it in your backyard or in a friend’s/farmer’s piece of land – which many people are open to doing – you can now consider yourself a beekeeper.
Fellow apartment residents shouldn’t let not having back yard stop you. Contact your local beekeeping group or the Federation for help on finding a home for your bees
One journey ends, but an even bigger and more complex one begins.
Trial and error costs a lot of time and money, and even billions of bee lives.
Education and training, trial and error, bees, and equipment can cost years of life and tens of thousands of dollars.
The problem is that besides the Flow Hive that came out recently, there really has not been amazing, game-changing technology in beekeeping. We live in the information age, yet there is a massive information blackout when it comes to honey bees.
We live in the information age, yet there is a massive information blackout when it comes to honey bees.
To illustrate this point, I have been a beekeeper for ten years, and if I’m being honest, I’ve killed a lot of bees in that time. Not on purpose, and most likely for reasons I’ll ever know, but it crushes me every time I open a hive to find the bees have died. In between inspections, a lot can happen.
In-between inspections a lot can happen, and I remember wishing I could see what was going on 24/7 so I wouldn’t miss anything.
I knew there was a better way. I started digging through the internet, and after hundreds of forum, courses, and products later, I realized there still isn’t a good solution for the “I don’t know” problem that we all face.
Sure, there are toys out there that will tell you the temperature or sound of your hive, but in isolation what does that tell you? You need a lot of things working together to find out the state of a hive at any given time.
A good example of this in practice is when you go to your doctor when you’re sick. Do they just check your temperature or do they look over a number of vital signs and pain points to assess what is wrong with you? Hopefully, the latter. Trust me it’s a big difference. (link to other post about sickness/mission)
We need to use that same type of all-in-one, holistic, approach to this problem. And, we need to make technology that creates massive value for bees, beekeepers, and bee researchers all at the same time.
It’s the difference between catching someone when they are about to fall an inch off the ground vs when they first start to stumble!
Final
In the end, everything down to what type of clamp to use to hold parts together were held to the hard scrutiny of what is best for the bees, then what was best for beekeepers and bee researchers.
We are stuck in a world with complex issues, but this one, the one of the bees, beekeepers, and bee researchers can be solved with your help.
The future of beekeeping is here and now. If you would take just 10 seconds, you can help make it happen.
Soon there will be a Kickstarter to help fund this project from prototype phase to production. I have a clear vision, and team to build this.
I cannot do this alone.
Help me, help the bees, and help the beekeeping community
Share this with five of your friends, and get signed up for the Kickstarter updates (special unique exclusive content through that channel).
Feel free to DM me. I’m always up for talking about bees!
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
Hey Lowell, I would love to chat with you about this in detail. Can you get in touch and Ill send you more info about what I am thinking?
Hello Edward, Thank you for writing. I sent you a message over linkedin. If I somehow sent this to the wrong person, then I’ll send another message to your email.