A few points:
- Don’t knock the Flow Hive. It works. It’s absolutely not for anyone with any commercial bend, but for hobbyists it’s not a useless gadget if one knows how to manage honey bee colonies and doesn’t mind the heft of lifting the damn thing every time one needs to do an inspection. Have been running 4 Flow Frames for 3 years now and they are a consistently high producer of honey.
- Automation per se is not bad - look at how it has transformed agriculture from GPS-controlled tractors to devices that milk cows and automatically analyze quality of milk, etc. There’s even a brewing controversy as to who owns this equipment: the farmer who bought it or the manufacturer who insists that an $800,000 combine cannot be self-repaired because it’s really a computer on big wheels and farmers are not software engineers. Google Deere and right to self-repair laws.
- I cannot but for the life of me see how this robot would function in any area with plant resins. In my area of NY every frame is glued like a rock with propolis by the end of the season if I’m not vigilant and keeping it somewhat reasonable. That robot arm would twist itself into a pretzel after a while if it had to deal with any reasonable propolis presence.
Przemek
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