BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • Electronic monitoring

  • General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #5106  by AdamD
 29 Oct 2019, 09:25
Our association had a hive on some old industrial 'platform scales' so you could slide the little counter-weight along the bar and see how much honey had been gathered since the previous check.
 #5107  by Chrisbarlow
 29 Oct 2019, 17:41
Patrick wrote:
28 Oct 2019, 23:41
The thing that bothers me is when people flogging stuff give beginners the idea that this stuff is essential to keep bees
Sadly, there is an awful lot of that about
 #5108  by Chrisbarlow
 29 Oct 2019, 17:42
NigelP wrote:
29 Oct 2019, 08:50
Its always surprised me that no-one seems to manufacture floors with build in scales that transmit via Bluetooth/wifi. I know you can get hive scales but these are separate items that you need to lift your hives onto.
It would save hours of regular hefting. Might even find out why some hive burn through their stores and some are extremely frugal.
I'd settle for a good quality floor!
 #5110  by Alfred
 30 Oct 2019, 18:23
Chrisbarlow wrote:
28 Oct 2019, 19:14
Alfred wrote:
28 Oct 2019, 07:58
Toys
Just get on with keeping bees.
If you need to get nerdy go on Robot Wars :lol:
Not toys but interesting, trial and error, it might be quite useful. Maybe, maybe not

Everything we use today was once some one else's trial and error until they realised what they had was of use to everyone else. Then it turned into basic equipment :D
Still not convinced.
I'm a tech loving luddite :shock:
The scales are a great idea,especially for newbs but the other kit?
No,as Patrick originally said,all that data is useless especially if you're a week away from the apiary.
We have processes at work that grind to a halt when the snake oil gadgets that they have depedancy upon fail and manual override is an alien concept.
Laugh we do.
I love beekeeping because it's so refreshingly low tech.
Nearly everything I need can be either made or found in cupboards at home(or
skips :lol: )
 #5118  by Japey Edge
 31 Oct 2019, 13:20
I've had a little look at making a DiY floor with load cells, controlled by an arduino nano and somehow getting that to transmit the data back to a server via WiFi. The main issue with scales is that they need to be tared to a known force. Constant weight of the hives would produce inaccuracies as load cells creep. A way round it would be to incorporate something to take the weight back off the scales, tare them, then put the weight back in.
Automated - it would be some kit
Manual - it would minimise the wireless capability

Hmm
 #5121  by Alfred
 31 Oct 2019, 20:25
Thats a shame as I liked that idea but it illustrates my point -its going to get complicated and therefore more prone to fups.
It will become a pastime in itself and beekeeping will get overshadowed.
I like technology and I hate to admit it but I would struggle without my swiss army knife of a smartphone but there is a definate cut off point that is too often ignored.

Ive got a Massey Ferguson tractor to assist me with other jobs on the apairy site
Its closely related to the little grey Fergies that got the country back off its knees after the war.
In the toolbox is a half brick and a cold chisel. :lol:
It never fails(it dare not..)
One morning last month I was talking to the 'pilot' of an absolutely enormous tractor-ship thing that had broken down in the fields nearby.
I climbed up up the staircase into the cockpit .No levers no buttons -just a touch screen.
He doesnt even have to steer it as the fields are GPS mapped(the electricity pylons are too sometimes :o )
The whole plot had just ground to a halt without good reason or symptom.
The dealers "mechanic" had been out but didnt have sufficient semiconductors in his screwdriver so the UK specialist was expected sometime late afternoon.Wasted time and money.
The poor kid didnt even have a phone signal for his facebook gawping while he waited.
 #5127  by Cable_Fairy
 01 Nov 2019, 17:30
Cable_Fairy wrote:
27 Oct 2019, 20:26
Her in doors suggested I get the Arina one last Christmas but after a bit of investigation it seemed rather expensive to run for just two hives.
During the summer I built a weighing scale which works very well. I purchased a digital bathroom scale and took it to bits and mounted them on a piece of ply, the digital readout on top and the four load cells underneath. Now instead of guessing the weight by hefting I lift the hive and slide the scale under. Cost less than a tenner.
 #5133  by Japey Edge
 02 Nov 2019, 12:33
Yeah I've seen a few of those about. I'll probably make some myself, but the real challenge is making a floor under constant load read accurate weights over the months or years.
The dream would be those with an out-apiary being able to open up an app, read the data on all the hives in that apiary so many miles away, and then they're armed with all that info to think about on the drive to the apiary. Humidity, temperature, weight. I quite like stuff like this so I'd find it interesting.