>> see a hive that is not flying like the
>> rest that says something is wrong.
> This is another thing that some people miss.
> Just staring at the entrances for a while
> can tell you a bunch.
Heinrich Storch's insightful but occasionally apocryphal collection of Zen
koans about bees, "Am Flugloch" has been available in a decent English
translation for quite some time under the title "At the Hive Entrance", so
any number can now pull up a lawn chair and play "watch the bees" with some
expert analysis.
But I've always found that the pre-dawn examination of what the bees have
put out on the landing board overnight is a far, far better leading
indicator of hive health than watching entrance activity. The only problem
is that you have to get up and out the door well before dawn, and walk your
yards, coffee in hand.
> software that tracks flight activity over time...
> http://www.keltronixinc.com
The only problem here seems that they are selling a device that depends upon
the software, yet they seem to have no intention of delivering that software
to the buyer, as with so many "internet devices" being sold these days. My
advice to your friends would be to rethink that part of the offering, or at
least utilize a code repository to assure access to the crucial software
part of their product offering in the event that their venture tanks, and
they all wander off.
The problem with these "internet connected devices" goes much further than
their complete inability to run self-sufficiently for long periods and/or
without a link to a server somewhere. They take the customer's data
"hostage", and the device itself becomes useless if the vendor goes out of
business and its servers go down.
The company need not even go out of business - they can simply decide that
they do not want to "support" what you bought, the most recent example being
Google/Nest and their overt "shutdown" of the Revolv home automation servers
so many people bought, never mind about the "lifetime service" sold to each
and every buyer:
http://medium.com/@arlogilbert/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container
-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1
http://tinyurl.com/hp4uegj
I bought an "Apiara" hive scale last year. It has decent battery life, and
can be easily fitted with external batteries and/or solar panel recharging,
but it requires a WiFi connection, and sends its data to the company
servers, not to you.
The scale itself, like nearly all the hive scales I've seen others offer for
sale, has no effective temperature compensation, as the "designers" of these
things were inexplicably ignorant of how to temperature-stabilize a
Wheatstone or even a Wien bridge. So the gizmos are so inaccurate as to be
nearly useless in the cold, and worse yet, they all drift wildly over time
under load, exactly the scenario of being a beehive monitor. But faced with
that basic design flaw, the Apiara company has no fix, and now teeters on
the brink of oblivion, and I may be left owning a device about the size of a
brick that may soon be only useful as a brick.
Yes, I could tear into the firmware, and resurrect it with a patch that
would send the data wherever the user wanted, but that sort of fall-back
alternative option should be DESIGNED INTO these devices from the get-go. I
should not have to take several Saturday mornings out of my life to
reverse-engineer it with my BusPirate, SUMP, and circa-1970s antique HP
1600a Logic Analyzer (yes, it has a 1607a extension, no, it is not for
sale). I do it for fun, because there a few opportunities to fiddle with
things these days - even my 1950s era Sunbeam Model T-20 toaster needs no
repair or adjustment at all.
I've contributed to open source projects that push the limits of the DMCA
Section 1201, by disassembling, augmenting, and replacing vendor firmware
with more useful code that makes an otherwise "bricked" or "locked" device
useful without the vendor, and I now have a "jailbroken" and highly modified
Ooma, Sonos, Roku, and even a few Fon units. (Maybe the lesson to be
learned is to avoid products with cutesy made-up names that sound like
Klingon or Swahili.)
But to put such an amount of work into something requires a large number of
people who are angry about not being able to actually own and control what
they bought. I doubt if there are enough beekeepers who are also coders and
tinkerers to self-assemble into a project team to be able to do the same
with similar "orphan-ware" sold to beekeepers.
In contrast, the Nectar Detector runs for over a year on a watch battery,
and is completely stand-alone, with no need of bluetooth, WiFi, TCP/IP,
NetBIOS, UUCP, UDP, 4GLTE, RS-232, USB, shortwave, DTEC, NFC, RFID, or any
other acronym-studded exercise in frustration. It has a high-contrast
sunlight-viewable a LCD display, and there is a backlight if you are working
too early or too late. A spiral notebook and a #2 pencil are suggested for
jotting down weight measurements. Trendlines are a basic feature of any
spreadsheet.
http://nectar-detector.com
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