3D printed beehives
Contents
Basics
- To make beehives and other beekeeping equipment from plastic by digital fabrication rather than carving them from wood.
Rationale
A billion people are undernourished. Most are subsistence farmers with little money. Finding very cheap ways to enable people to grow more food is therefore the best way to combat malnutrition.
Bees increase the productivity of flowering plants by about one-third. They also produce commercially-valuable substances, like wax, and honey, a very energy-rich food. It would be great to spread beekeeping to malnourished subsistence farmers. What are the costs of doing this?
Bóthar dead link, needs fixing are quoting €50 per hive. Oxfam dead link, needs fixing quote $200, but this includes training. Commercially-available hives from thorne.co.uk cost £100-200GBP. I suspect that the main component of the cost is the labour needed to craft the hives. (I'll inquire with charities promoting bees to confirm this.)
Enter digital fabrication - I believe that if we print hives with a RepRap we can reduce the time and labour by a factor of 100. The only cost is materials (polylactic acid), which should be at most a few bucks per hive.
Extending the idea, supplying RepRaps to small farmers would allow them to effortlessly make their own beekeeping equipment and also earn extra income by selling beehives.
Also "walls" of beehives (ie attach them to existing fences or placing them in lines along the border of the site, have been shown as a promising form of large pest detterance
Potential Advantages
- Not rotting/getting infested by termites etc (unlike wood) ( User:Eric here, in north florida, even if treated due to the humidity, and termites wood doesn't last long)
- Cool things that can be designed/added in
- Flowhive had an intresting extraction, but was misleading due to all the other work needed, also may stress/harm bees, needs researc
- However some other system doing a similar thing
- Also weird geometries that can only be made with 3d printing
- Infill/dual walls for insulation
- It could be designed to integrate well with other systems such as the honey centrifuge, etc
Potential disadvantages
- There is a small chance that bees won't like the plastics used.
- This is an open question that can only be settled by experiment
- They tolerate styrofoam hives without complaint, so I don't anticipate a problem.
- UV Degradation of the components in "real world" use
- Bees will often cover areas in 'propolis', so the specific material the hive is made of is not that crucial to the bee, except for its insulating characteristics and its capacity for absorption of humidity to keep the climate inside of the beehive acceptable, especially in winter. A good design of the hive could avoid heat-loss through drafts while ensuring sufficient ventilation of humid air.
To do
- Draw up CAD files based on these (public domain) designs: Langstroth hive design or National hive design.
- Try one out on some real live bees.
I have a 3d printer and am a beekeeper, some help with the models i will be glad to try this. (username)
Internal Links
- Wax Beehive Frame Foundations / 3D Printed Beehive Frame Foundations
- Essentially have preformed hexagonal cells, debate as if they should be used one or not, but good to have the resource available for those who do so
- Bee Barn (A Beehive that is a Variation of the Langstroth Hive designed by the YouTube Channel "Vino Farm" that is modified for Ergonomics and Winterization among other things)
- Top-Bar Hives / Long Box Hives (Essentially if Langstroth Hives are Skyscrapers, these are Row Houses / Town Houses )
- Obvious Ergonomic and Practical Benefits, it can complicate Honey Extraction depending on frame shape etc, also debate on effectiveness/how the bees adapt to / feel about it
