Open Source Beehive project

Following on from my previous post, one of the other bee-related articles I managed to get into the magazine was a piece on the Open Source Beehive (OSBH) project. 

This project is a collaboration between designers at the Fab Lab in Barcelona and the Open Tech Collaborative in Denver, US, which develops open source commercial products.

The overall aim of the OSBH project is to build a global community of beekeepers to share data and collectively study bee behaviour and they are going about that in two ways.

The first  is the design of two 'biodynamic' beehives - the Colorado Top Bar (left) and the Barcelona Warre (right) - which can be easily machined from downloadable files (found here) and assembled, with no screws or glue.

The second is the development of a sensor kit that is placed inside the hive to monitor what's going on inside. the sensors will connect to the internet and the logged dats will be streamed to an online platform, where it will be openly available for public analysis.

I'm a huge supporter of this project. All I need now is someone with a CNC machine who is willing to make me a hive....

You can read the article in its entirety here.