Monday, July 07, 2008

Honey, my sweet and sticky moonshine business

My sweet summer activity is organizing my bees in perfect order. Imagine getting 50000 bees to march on your order? That is quite a challenge ...

Handling bees is actually a very interesting activity. The main tasks include:
  • Expansion during spring to prepare and scale each bee-hive for all flowers blossoming during early summer.
  • Making sure they have enough space to store all honey.
  • Counter all attempts to swarm.
  • Remove honey to stimulate further collection
  • Extracting the honey
  • Tapping it on jars
  • Preparing for the winter
  • Rest
Seeing the small insects flying all day collecting honey, working for your wellbeing, is a true pleasure. As most of the work is done during the summer enables you to more carefully study nature and its changes. Will it be sunshine today, when will the raspberry blossom and most importantly: will my customers like my honey?

To help with all of these tasks me and a friend have started a project to automate as much as possible of the tasks and at least create a good foundation to make decisions on when to visit the bees to collect honey. We will create a system for weighing the bee-hive and tracking the weather. Thus we will be able to see when it is time to collect the honey and what the weather is like (can I open the hive today?). We will of course make all design available on the web.