This is the kind of thing that is presented or proposed to me almost every
other month in NYC by yet another group of earnest, heavily bearded,
painfully young men and earnest, very intense, fast-talking young women with
slightly less body hair.  

It is typical of today's novice beekeeper, in that it is not enough that
they aspire to learn to keep bees, they approach the task convinced before
reading the first book on the subject that they can "save" the bees from the
stupidity of all current beekeepers by abandoning some large swath of the
practices and/or equipment that has seemed to be useful for the past 200 or
so years, replacing it with something that is a minor variant of a concept
unjustly rejected by beekeepers several times over the past decades:
 
"The Open Source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat
faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world. The
project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a
sustainable way, to monitor and track the health and behaviour of a colony
as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory kit, The Smart
Citizen Kit (SCK), which can transmit to an open data platform:
Smartcitizen.me"

And anyone with a laser cutter can download and build their own Warre or yet
another Top-Bar hive (not sure how thick the wood would be if it can be cut
with a laser cutter of the sort found at most "Maker spaces"):

https://github.com/opensourcebeehives/Colorado_Top_Bar_v.2.0
https://github.com/opensourcebeehives/OSwarre-hive/

But the effort does not stop with new styles of boxes made of very thin
wood, you can also install sensors of various types hooked up to (yawn)
Arduino sensors, and share the data over a (yawn) neat-o social media
geo-located mapping application backed by the company that sells all the
sensors.  Because, of course, why would anyone trudge around, light a smoker
like some sort of caveman holding a torch, and look at a hive's condition
with your own eyes, when for only a few hundred dollars per hive, you could
instrument it up so that you could inspect it with a few taps on your
smartphone?

So, when people ask me why I consume so much single-malt, I tell them that
it helps me to smile when presented with such gifts to all of humanity from
people who expect me to not only listen to their lectures, but to
endorse/adopt their "innovative" approaches, and to give them seed capital
for their venture.

At least this fellow did not place any of his unreachable, unmonitorable,
unmaintainable, immovable-comb swarm factories on tall poles in NYC, they
are all in Kansas City, where he lives, and can take either credit or blame,
depending upon how people view the idea of removing the beekeeper from the
equation as a possible way to "save the bees":
http://deepecologyproject.com

The problem with beekeeping is not the absurdly low barriers to entry and
the nearly assured seemingly-easy first-year success.  The problem is the
incredibly high barrier to success in years 2 through n.

And in "E = hv", h is Planck's constant, and v is, of course, the length of
the planck.
 

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