Kelton Temby

Thanks Chris!

It's still a dauntingly large sum to go, but we're really happy to have found others who are excited about the project and are getting involved!

Our most recent backer was actually from the original local Beta group - Lew, recently retired and a newbie beekeeper, got EyesOnHives Beta set up just last weekend and after seeing other hives on the platform, sadly realized his hive wasn't just quiet because of winter, it had failed, and died out. Then Lew got to see a very interesting event - a massive amount of activity started, and we hoped at first it might be a wild swarm. Unfortunately it was robbing activity from another hive that discovered the dead out... we captured the activity pattern.



I was fortunate enough to have succeeded in an experiment to do a really late season split, and have a nice healthy laying queen with some good stores. Yesterday I made the trip down to Lew's to give him a new start, you can only imagine how happy he is! Not too bad for less than a week after getting EyesOnHives running.

I'd like to send you what I have now as a draft for sharing with your audience. I wish I'd had more time to refine it!

Hey Chris,

Thank you for your sage advice, and for helping us understand what's happening. You know, I naively thought being insanely passionate about bees to the point of spending a year with 6 other people creating a totally new technology to help save them would be enough to get everyone else excited! It's a great learning experience nonetheless.

I would love to submit a guest post for Organic Life Guru, that would be really wonderful! Thank you so much for your offer of support!

Also a fantastic idea to create the online course - I had a quick look at the course tool, and it looks really interesting, I'm going to share this with our team.

Thanks again for your advice Chris, I'm really happy to have connected with you!

Best,

Kelton

Chris Badgett wrote:Kelton,

Great job with this piece of technology! I wish you all the best on the Eyes on Hives Kickstarter campaign.

It's great to see the overlap of digital technology and sustainability.

Getting more honeybee data through apps like this will be valuable for the beekeeper and the activist.

Hey Chris,

Thanks so much for your encouragement, it really means a lot to the team and I! We really hope we'll get the crowdfund across the line for the next 30 systems, even if we don't, we're determined to keep chipping away at this project locally because it's what we believe in, and we're helping connect our beekeeping community.

I read through a few of your posts and found that you have some kickstarter experience yourself! We have just 18 days to go, but that's enough time to make changes to our approach. Could you please share any advice on what we might do better? What do you think is stopping the project from being more successful?

Thank you for any feedback you're comfortable sharing, I really appreciate it!

Kelton

Thanks Cj Sloane, will keep that one in mind.

We're most interested in doing what we can to get people excited about being part of crowd-sourcing data to help the bees, and other beekeepers. One of my takeaways is that we need to make the system more valuable to individual beekeepers.

Thanks again!

Hi Michael and Cj,

Thanks for your feedback, it's really helpful to hear this from other beekeepers.

We're almost completely aligned on treatment free beekeeping goals - my hives are all foundationless, and I raise queens from local survivor stock to share with friends and help other beekeepers. The last thing we're doing is advocating using chemical treatments, and propping up bad bee genetics (which includes bees that aren't suited locally).

We have experienced that being able to see and track colonies gives us the option to get feedback and improve beekeeping management practices. E.g. leaving a hive with too much room for the bees to patrol lets the Small Hive Beetle take hold, and activity drops. We make the change and then see the colony start growing again. Having hive stands which allow raccoons or other creatures to mess with the hive, or ants to get in, also isn't really something the bees will necessarily adjust for, but simple changes in the setup of the hive can help the bees thrive.

We presently have 15 systems supporting our local community of beekeepers, and I help run our local association. The system is making it easier to better understand the state of bees in our local community, and increase awareness and respond faster to pesticide spraying incidents etc.

It's not just data in the app, but the easy communication framework built around the data that helps too. For example, you can click on a video that you think shows something interesting and alert me or another beekeeper, and I'll not just get a notification, I'll be able to see exactly what you're looking at through video too. I used this just yesterday to let a local beta user know that their hive was covered in ants.

I completely appreciate your feedback around not seeing the value of the above, especially if you have enough room and bees and the time to run mass bee experiments. This version may be better suited to sub/urban beekeepers.

We need some help understanding the potential value to other beekeepers outside our local needs. If none of the above resonates, can you please suggest what problems you would be interested in having a tech tool to help manage?

We're designed and made in the USA and want to keep it that way if possible. If you do have price expectations, please share them too.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and having this dialog, I really appreciate it!

Thanks again Tel,

I appreciate your open minded and practical approach. I can say that for our local community of beekeepers, so far the project has been a net positive, and personally I would have lost at least 2 hives without the tech.

Hopefully we'll get enough support to grow the project, get more feedback, and more momentum for adding other features people are interested in.

Thanks for your reply Michael.

Those ideas are great, and I think the data would let you test those scenarios.

On 'waking up earlier' we find that when the temperature, humidity and wind speed allow, our bees actually get up much earlier and have a 'wake up spike'. Here's a pic showing early morning activity, and no orientation activity later in the day, most likely due to wind speed.
http://imgur.com/FtyquP1

Do you always know what causes a hive loss? Do you ever see the need to be able to visually check in, and prioritize whether to visit that day, or wait to the weekend?

I'm curious whether you have ever had any 'urgent' issues that require pretty quick intervention - e.g. here's a series of videos that helped us first identify, then troubleshoot, then finally resolve ants attacking a hive.

EoH Timelapse showed a ton of ants attacking hive - tested 'cinnamon sticks' :


Next day, ants are attacking hive again, walking all over cinnamon


Finally, hive stand kept ants out of hive


Thanks again for continuing the conversation!

Hi Tel,

Thanks again for your feedback - yes you're right that we want to correlate bps, and the bps patterns with significant hive states and transitions.

We also want to make it really easy for beekeepers of different skill levels to get insights into what's happening to their bees, and create some standards for understanding what might be happening to a hive in a different city beyond just 'frames of bees, frames of brood'. It's a little like giving people feedback on how fast their car is going, and whether the check engine light is on. Maybe you have a better analogy?!

We have started a conversation with some of the leading bee researchers, and they're keen on the 'measure everything' approach presently too. We'd like to prove that it's possible (or not) to have a useful metric that doesn't require devices to be expertly placed in hives, since that seems to be one of the limitations of internal sensors for many beekeepers.

Curious whether you're part of a beekeeping community/club - the original system really was designed to make it easy for one of the local beekeeping gurus to have an easier time helping other beekeepers with their bees. He simply didn't have time to be driving all over town helping new beekeepers deal with their issues, and was asking myself and others to manually count how many bees came out of hives to get some idea on hive strength. We got inspired by the concept, and showed that tech could make the whole process a lot easier!

Thanks again,

Kelton

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Tel!

What are you most interested in seeing with regard to the continuous record? How many hours of video would you want to see each day?

Here's a pic showing why we think of it as a health monitor - over time, the bee flight activity measurement can see changes we might miss with our own eyes!

If anyone has any questions, comments or criticisms, we'd love to hear from you. We have been working with local beekeepers from the Santa Barbara Beekeepers Association for the past year to refine the features of the current version.

We were hoping to create a conversation around technology and beekeeping. I grew up with bees, am a hobbyist beekeeper and work in a medical tech company by day. For the last year my team and I been working on this tech to bring healthcare analytics to bee hives.

We wanted feedback about what the community had to say about our approach to non-invasively monitor hive activity since as far as we know we're the first to achieve this at scale, and have seen some pretty interesting bee behavior patterns.

Thank you!