Gadget Allows You to Keep Bees In Your Apartment

greenrainbow writes "Philips just unveiled a new concept for an urban beehive that would allow anyone to become an amateur bee keeper – even those who live in apartments with no backyards. Best of all you pull a little string and all the fresh honey you want comes out. Hopefully no bees come with it!"

How Do You Prime/Put a Swarm Into This?

[eldavojohn]

I'm not a beekeeper but my aunt had a couple hive boxes that she kept year round. One had a hive that stayed around but the other had a problem of dying off or swarming and moving away (despite the fact that we treated each box exactly the same and packed them with hay bails just before winter). Once she captured a hive with a nuc and successfully moved it into the failing hive box but it didn't last long. This minimalist design appears to solve the warmth issue (by keeping it on the inside of your home) but what happens when your swarm moves or your queen dies and there's no brood to create a new hive? Is there a method to repopulating these things?

Also, does anyone know if bees select their hives based on locality to fields and nectar sources? From my aunt's experiences, bees seem to be fickle creatures and will readily leave due to inattentive keepers. I imagine a lot of these things would just end up empty.

One more concern is that the small aperture on the outside might be subject to blockage by freezing rain, ice or snow and in the picture it looks like it would be hard to remedy that.

As a beekeper

[PhracturedBlue]

I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.

Re:As a beekeper

[MancunianMaskMan]

As a fellow beekeeper, i'd go further and say this is utter BS. Like most of the "inhabitat" stuff, actually.

Re:As a beekeper

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a beekeeper for about 10 years. Had about 150 hives at my peak. I completely agree with you. How in the world are you supposed to maintain this thing? Its not like you can just scrape propolis off. That stuff is natures caulking! Also, there is no queen excluder, so you can't control where eggs are laid. This means the eggs with be in the center of the comb and spread radially. You probably won't have any comb that is just honey, so extraction without decimating the population will be nearly impossible. I suspect the person who designed this learned about bees by reading a Winey the Poo book.

Re:As a beekeper

[TFAFalcon]

The bigger question is how you get the honey but not the eggs/larva. While probably not inedible, honey with all the extra 'protein' would be quite disgusting.

Maybe not so much with the warmth.

[Slartibartfast]

A hive that doesn't winter well is a sickly hive; something's wrong. A hive that's kept warm all winter, I'd actually have huge concerns about: the bees' metabolism would kick into gear: they'd both need more food, and (likely) need to clean the hive. The first would be... interesting to implement, the second would almost certainly be impossible with temperatures near or below freezing. (Bees really don't like to be out in temps below the mid 50's.)

Bees don't leave due to inattentive keepers; they leave only when something is incredibly stressful in their environment -- not enough to forage from (though that's almost inconceivable in most locales, including cities), or -- far more likely -- persistent pestering by skunks, raccoons, etc. They seem to have no problem trying to get some honey for themselves in the middle of the night. There are two ways bees leave a hive: swarming, which is really just when the hive is large enough to branch out, and absconding, which is Bad News, and almost always due to environmental factors.

And, yes, I was a beekeeper. ;-)

Honey extraction not automatic

[Zinho]

If you look at the Phillips Urban Beehive page [philips.com] you'll see that the pull cord is simply a smoke release, not a honey extractor. Even with the smoke, I wouldn't want to be running beekeeping operations in my kitchen. In fact, I'd be willing to say that the only purpose of this design is decorative, not functional: it's for people that just want to look at bees and feel good about being "close to nature" in their homes. I'll let the beekeepers on the forum take care of the rest of the design's flaws, they've already got it covered.

Re:So...

[Jeng]

Monty Python music?

I think you mean Benny Hill music, aka Yakety Sax.

Yakety Sax makes everything funny.

Re:"It depends."

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not true. I've removed dozens of hives from the walls and attics of homes, as well as several trees that were being removed. I've even removed a hive that was built on the OUTSIDE of a limb (I guess the swarm gave up looking for a home). Think of the hive as a sphere (adapted in shape to the enclosure). The eggs are generally at the center of the hive and as the hive grows in size, the radius of the comb that contains eggs grows as well. Honey and pollen are stored on the outer most part of the comb, and new comb is added at the outer edge. In these instances, the only time I could easily separate the honey comb from the brood was on very large colonies that had grown into large areas of the walls of a home. Its highly unlikely in a natural hive to grab a piece of comb without getting some of the eggs or pollen, and given the size and design of this system, I'd say this still applies. Beekeepers use "queen excluders" to keep the queen out of the areas of the hive that they want to only contain honey. I've seen and used several different types, but they all come down to a hole or holes too small for the queen to fit through but large enough for workers.

The Phillips site gives a better context

[brokeninside]

In an interview with a beekeeper:

Phillips: I showed him some first phase renders of the Initial beehive concepts and asked him his opinion in general about the idea.

Beekeeper: It is actually not a bad idea. It is kind of an existing product for beekeepers. It is a one hive system in a glass box and they use it for educational purposes. Also as a show element in markets and so on to promote their products and increase awareness for the bees and beekeeping. These are not suitable for honey production in a large scale. Neither sustainable on the long run due to the low mass of bees.

http://www.design.philips.com/shared/assets/design_assets/pdf/portfolio/qa_beehive.pdf [philips.com]

It may also help to understand the way in which Phillips is pushing ideas like this. They're an exploration of ideas more than attempts to bring products to market.

The Design Probe projects carried out by Philips Design are part of a wider Philips strategy aimed at improving the innovation hit rate. While it is not intended that design concepts coming out of the Probes program are translated to marketable solutions, insights gained from debate around the concepts feed into future innovation for the company.

http://www.design.philips.com/about/design/designportfolio/design_futures/design_probes/index.page [philips.com]

Illegal in most areas? Design flaws?

[RealSalmon]

I am an avid beekeeper (yes, yet another on /. . . . very odd we have so many here). This thing looks all kinds of screwy to me. There a are quite a number of design flaws on this thing, of which a very small sample follows.

• --Last I checked, in most areas it is illegal to keep bees in equipment w/o *removable* frames. In looking at the equipment here, I'm not sure it meets that requirement.
• --Bees prefer to build their comb strait down, with the cell just slightly angled up. Among other things, this prevents gravity from taking its toll on the contents. The angle of the "frames" on this contraption do not allow for this.
• --The queen prefers darkness. All that exposure to light seems to me to be an unwelcome source of stress for her. If mama ain't happy . . . ain't nobody happy.
• --I simply don't think that there is enough room in this "hive" to house a healthy colony. They will quickly leave for a more suitable location.
• --The insides of hives do not stay sexy. All that gorgeous, new, white comb very quickly becomes dark and brittle (in the brood nest, anyway), and they tend to build burr comb in places you don't like.
• --Being able to drain honey from the hive whenever you may please . . . yeah, that's a good idea. In a hive this small (see above comment), they aren't going have enough room for surplus even if you never took a drop. They will starve in this thing over the winter . . . and probably over the summer too, depending on weather conditions. Again though, I doubt they will stay long enough for that to be an issue.

Re:Maybe not so much with the warmth.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bees actually do learn when there is food available and when there isn't. There are times in the San Joaquin Valley when it is a virtual desert for the bees. There's simply no forage for them at all. During this dearth the bees don't bother to send out foragers for food at all, just for water. They can tell the temperature outside and they won't fly outside to forage, just only quick enough to relieve themselves on a warm day. Having them indoors would help them get through the winter as long as you don't take their honey during that period. They wouldn't have to spend so much energy to keep warm and they'll still cluster. There's a lot of signals that tell the hive what to do. One of them is the length of the day. Shortening days tell the queen to slow down on egg laying and tell the workers to start getting the hive ready for the coming winter.

While the design is cool, I see a lot of potential for problems. Bees like their privacy. While there are observation hives, they have covers to block the light from entering the hive when it's not being observed. Bees don't like light entering the hive, period, and will most likely try to cover the glass with propolis in an attempt to block out the light. If they can't do that then there's a great potential for them to abscond. It needs a cover for when they're not being observed. Simply filtering light to the orange spectrum is not going to help them.

The article states that the hive will use some sort of foundation to guide the bees where to draw out comb. If the foundations are made out of plastic, and are not covered in a thin layer of wax, good luck in getting the bees to accept it. They'd rather draw out wonky comb where they want rather than use plastic foundation and that could mean that the glass gets covered with comb. To someone who really doesn't have any experience with bees, this means opening the hive to get that comb off the glass.

I could go on and on, but in so many ways this is so wrong and it shouldn't be done. I am a Beekeeper in California by the way. Bees should only be kept where they can be put a safe distance from people. Bees can become extremely defensive of their hives and the potential for getting stung rises with how close you are to the hive. If you're within 10 feet of the entrance, you're considered a participant and fair game for a sting.