Gadget Allows You to Keep Bees In Your Apartment 252
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!"
Yeah, right (Score:2)
At most, all the fresh honey contained therein will come out. This may be less than all the fresh honey I want.
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/. troll (Score:2)
Article Title (Score:5, Funny)
Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept
I'll admit... it's entirely possible that I don't understand the meaning of that word.
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It all depends on a person's fetishes...
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I like my women like I like my coffee...covered in BEES!
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Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept
I'll admit... it's entirely possible that I don't understand the meaning of that word.
Just in case you're mind's going where I think it is, on no account should you stick your dick in a beehive..... At least without smoking it first.
Re:Article Title (Score:5, Funny)
Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept
I'll admit... it's entirely possible that I don't understand the meaning of that word.
Just in case you're mind's going where I think it is, on no account should you stick your dick in a beehive..... At least without smoking it first.
Without SMOKING it first?!?
And you're worried about the beehive being a sexy fetish ....
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The second "outside" photo looks a heck of a lot like a urinal. I suppose with aggressive enough bees drunk guys will only make the mistake once. The phrase "in the closet" has been replaced by certain morally superior republican lawmakers with "in the bathroom" so to a certain red state constituency this probably is extremely sexy.
Now if you remember the "milk bar" scene from Clockwork Orange then something similar outputting honey would be kind of cool, but this is not it.
The final possibility is someth
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How Do You Prime/Put a Swarm Into This? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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From what i know just sticking a swarm into an empty hive will work well enough - you just need to get yourself a swarm from a local bee keeper (can't wait for all the lawsuits from people stung by agitated bees).
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I don't think there is any way to 'force' a hive to stay put, but there is also not all that much that you need to do to persuade them to stay - some panes full of brood might help, since the bees will feel a need to care for them, but if you get unlucky they might fly away, or you get lucky and every hive you catch this way will remain.
Re:How Do You Prime/Put a Swarm Into This? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of good questions there.
I would presume that there's some form of service contract or services that can be purchased for things like "seeding" a new hive. What I'd be more worried about is the aspect of getting it cleaned out if you had a hive die-off due to infection or mites.
As for how bees select their hives... that's an oddity. I would guess that there was some unknown difference between your aunt's two hives - either in the genealogy of the bees themselves, or the location of the hive, like too much or too little shade compared to the other one. As you said, they can be fickle creatures. With the indoor/outdoor aspect, I'd be more worried about them getting fooled by the interior temperature during winter, and sending out all their scouts to die off in freezing temperatures.
In the other side though... you're about one 5-year-old with a baseball bat from having an angry swarm of bees in your apartment and a giant honey mess on the floor with this design. I don't know if that's such a great thought.
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Maybe not so much with the warmth. (Score:5, Informative)
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. ;-)
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My question is if bees can even survive a winter if their hive is kept warm. I though the low temperatures during winter were what enabled the workers to survive so much longer then their normal 'summer' lifetime.
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Bees don't hibernate or anything. During the winter, they expend a huge amount of energy keeping their hive warm. They must maintain a hive temperature between 85 and 95 degrees to survive. They do this by clustering together and rapidly vibrating their wings. That's what honey is for: it's stored energy so they can perform this function when there is no food available during the winter.
So bees kept indoors might actually survive better due to not needing to expend as much energy. The only question I gu
Re:Maybe not so much with the warmth. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Close... but not quite. (Score:3)
Bees don't keep the hive warm. Bees keep the *cluster* warm. At the center, it's near the temps you describe (which is where the queen hangs out); the fringes are considerably colder. The hive, itself, is probably several degrees above ambient, but it sure the hell ain't in the 80's. So, yeah, I completely disagree. ;-) If their metabolism were anything like it is in the summer, they would live the six-odd weeks that is the usual lifetime for a worker. As it is, wintering bees can see close to six mon
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"Insect puke". That does indeed make it sound horrible.
But by the same token, black pudding is pig scab. ... and alongside your black pudding, you might serve a fried hen period.
Honey is delicious.
The Phillips site gives a better context (Score:3, Informative)
In an interview with a beekeeper:
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What happens when the hive is ready to swarm, and the old queen can't leave?
As a beekeper (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As a beekeper (Score:5, Interesting)
Also as a fellow beekeeper, there are so many things wrong with this system that I don't know where to start. Beekeeping is taking care of bees, and unless you can pull and inspect combs to deal with queen cells/aging queens/wax moths/mites/foul brood/cycling old comb/harvesting/collecting pollen?/oh dear god...
Let alone, keeping the bees room temperature during the winter encourages the hive to fly on cold days and kill itself.
Oh, and the weight of the hive will drastically increase and change over the course of the year. Where's the physical support?
And how would you get your bees into the hive in the first place? Not a large enough opening to dump a box of bees in. ...
*sigh*
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It looks like it's a conceptual art project designed by someone who's never left the city and that it has never actually been tried. The pictures are mock-ups.
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won't tell you about Eric.
Re:As a beekeper (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Dude, it's not an actual product. It's a piece of concept art. It's not intended to be functional. It's designed to appeal to urban hipsters so that they can feel like they are ecologically responsible. Or something. The same ones who keep a compost container on their apartment counter despite the fact that they have no garden to use it on.
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Re:As a beekeper (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"It depends." (Score:3)
Comb generally doesn't mix the two. Larvae and honey are usually stored in separate locations. That being said, I have no idea how "pulling the string" would be able to differentiate. I imagine, however, that a strainer of some sort could keep most of the unpleasantness away. That being said, "as a fellow beekeeper," I, too, am with MancunianMaskMan: I just don't see how this could reasonably be expected to work, especially in cooler locales, where they'd be wintering in a room-temperature environment.
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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
as a non-beekeeper, WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
That's a demographic, there.
Beekeepers! (Score:3)
I'm less interested in why we have beekeepers, and more interested in how one becomes one. Is there some education you pursue? Did you decide on it as a career, or get to it by happenstance? Did you always love bees, or did you wake up one day and think, "I want to herd bees!" How hard is the business aspect of it? Is it your main business, or were you already a farmer and this is just a supplement?
I realize some of these sound flippant; I'm sorry. It's such a foreign thing, and yet pretty cool. I doubt
Re:Beekeepers! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most /. readers had an ant farm as a kid and loved it.
Keeping a beehive is a natural extension of that love.
A glass walled beehive in your house is an unnatural extension of that love but it is damn cool.
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Beekeeping is what nerds did in the middle ages before computers and HAM and model trains.
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You still have to get the honey out of them combs, preferably in a non-destructive fashion. Centrifuge is out, until you get some mighty tolerant bees. You could probably press the combs, but that would also destroy them, and opening the hive on a regular basis would not make your living room a very pleasant place to be. (even smoked bees will still start flying around once you move a few combs, and once the hive is closed they'll have nowhere to go, resulting in annoyed bees flying all over the apartment.
Re:As a beekeper (Score:4, Funny)
the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees.
And deprive the bees of a carnival ride?
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I've been thinking about keeping bees to supplement my love of mead.
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push button, receive bacon
is a myth.
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In the words of Nicholas Cage... (Score:2)
I already do (Score:2)
The real question... (Score:2)
If we feed this honey to dogs will they be dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Now I want one! (Score:5, Funny)
I was not interested in owning this device until I read your post.
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So don't use the honey to make home made mead.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Monty Python music?
I think you mean Benny Hill music, aka Yakety Sax.
Yakety Sax makes everything funny.
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Monty Python music? Surely this would be funnier with Benny Hill music and increased frame rates.
Nice picture (Score:2)
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There is a small flower pot in the front.
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That one plant on the outside... duh.
Multi-use (Score:2)
Very pretty, very functional. Now, rig this thing to fall off and smash when there's movement in the room in the small hours, and we've got a perfect burglar alarm. If you were attacked in the dark by a swarm of angry bees, the whole street would hear you screaming!
And then there are the health benefits. Even if it didn't dissuade any burglars, it'd make you think long and hard about those 3am fridge raids...
I get the feeling.. (Score:3)
I seriously can not see this ending well.
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We won't hear about that history. That is because PR only works one way, but it is also because of other things:
1 - The bees won't survive on apartments. They won't have anything to eat, so all the other problems won't happen. There won't be bees attacking people, difficulty on getting the honey, birds suddenly deciding to live inside your house, this thing breaking, it getting ugly with time or any other problem.
2 - It won't sell nearly as much to get at the news again. People aren't that crazy, and are la
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A cage would allow me to keep a tiger too (Score:3)
But that's not to say it would end well for either of us.
Insect pests, lawsuits, and contaminated honey. (Score:2)
How does breeding more bees solve the problem of having too many son's of bees in most cities?
More importantly (and more seriously), this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. And no landlord is going to like you cutting holes in your windowpanes (yes, I read the original press release [philips.com], not just the stupid article).
Seems it would also violate rules against the number of "pets" you're allowed to have. Also, the honey produced in an urban setting would probably have too many contaminants to be healthy.
April (Score:2, Interesting)
Is it April the 1st already?!
Night needs to be night (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't imagine the bees will be happy to have their diurnal rhythm screwed up by having their hive interior irregularly lit at night from room lighting.
Honey extraction not automatic (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I for one (Score:3)
Nickerson Farms (Score:2)
Anyone else old enough to remember Nickerson Farms restaurants?
They had something like this in every one.
Concept... (Score:2)
it is a concept after all, so some of it's shortcomings might be obvious to apiarist that aren't to the industrial designer who came up with the concept.
from a non-beekeeper perspective, some things seem lacking:
ingress/egress opening looks too small for proper venting... don't drones need larger openings in the summer to fan cooler air into the hive?
mechanism for extracting honey probably is destroying cells to release honey... wouldn't the bees build around this mechanism after a few uses?
i thought queens
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It's not about the queen needing a special chamber, but if you let her move freely about the hive, then the cells filled with honey will be mixed with those occupied by her brood (eggs/larva). Since beekeepers don't want that, there is usually a 'barrier' inside the hive, that prevents the queen from accessing the part intended for later harvesting.
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Humane?
What do you think happens when we get honey? we squish bees and the sweet stuff comes out?
I suggest you learn as to how honey is made and harvested.
A better idea... (Score:3)
(not the inverse, which would turn my domicile into a massive beehive...{shiver}).
NOPE. (Score:2)
The second I see one of these in my apartment complex is the second I confront my landlord (and possibly, look for another place to live.)
I'm not buying one of those! (Score:2)
It's covered in bees!
Half and half (Score:2)
Half of this is in fact possible, and is already being done and has been for decades...its called an "observation hive". Glass on at least one side, sits inside where it can be seen, a tube through a wall lets the bees get outside, so on and so forth. Google can tell you all about them.
The "pull a string for honey" part, however, and at least in my opinion, is total nonsense. Bees are not going to deposit the honey in a convenient comb-free location. And simply squeezing honey out of the comb would be a goo
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The summary is wrong. It's "pull a cord for smoke".
The question everyone is asking: (Score:2)
You already can. (Score:2)
All you need to do is give the bees an escape route, plastic tubes are used all the time for indoor hives.
Problem is, hive maintenance is a PITA. Beehives need to be maintained, they are not automatic by the bees, the wax buildup in a active hive will become huge if you dont harvest it regularly.
Any fool with some wood, plexiglass and PVC pipe can make an indoor hive.. BUT, if you dont maintain it and help them swarm to new hives, they will find a way to expand outside your hive and int your home. Be
Idle ? which idiot tagged this idle ? (Score:2)
I'll wait... (Score:3, Funny)
until they've worked the bugs out.
Illegal in most areas? Design flaws? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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There is an opening in the front, and bees are quite good at providing airflow though their hives - they stand on the ground and beat their wings to move air in the desired direction.
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Yeah if you trap bees in there they'll only be able to produce honey with whatever pollen they already had stuck to their legs. Bees can't fly freely = halted honey production.
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Yeah just realized, D'oh!
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Oh fuck me. s/pollen they already had stuck to their legs/nectar they already had in their stomachs/g
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Ummm... the bees can get out. This is a window mounted deal with an egress on the outside for the bees; on the inside, you get that fancy view of the hive and the "string" to get honey.
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Sure, but even if you don't get much honey, it'll certainly give a burglar (from outside the window) some pause, at the least.
Lots of window boxes and landscaped flowers in the cities - whether they make for good honey, that's unknown.
Ideally you have a field of flowring clover or some orchards nearby.
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The unit as conceptualized involves an exit via that white little tube sticking out of the back of the structure. The unit as presented is assembled around a window pane (walls aren't thin enough) with a hole cut in it to allow the exit tube to feed through.
Re:Wonderful... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have several friends who keep bees, and they all have bee sting stories. It's a bit like a fish story; the winner is the guy who gets nailed the worst. First time I heard that I asked whether that made them want to give it up, and the response was pretty much, "Nah, I took a couple of benedryls and lay down for a twenty minutes and I was right as rain."
The punchline to these stories isn't that these guys went on keeping bees; it's that they kept taking the shortcuts that got them stung in the first place.
Obviously you're just a pussy who's not man enough to keep bees. Don't feel bad, so am I. But for men (and women) who have the figurative balls to keep bees, keeping them in the house would be cool.
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I can't speak for others, but I'm man enough to keep bees.
But trust me - it's hell getting a collar onto the bastards!
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Apparently not even you, who still doesn't have an account while the number is over 2.5 million.
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Killer bees, Lazlow...
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I mean, really. Seems perfectly reasonable.
In Soviet Russian the Cagey Bee gets YOUR honey!
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What kind of landlord is going to allow a tenant to cut a hole in a window?
The same kind that would stand in front of this thing and with maniacal laughter exclaim "Fly, my pretties!"