Mike and Eric talk about how to use arduino controllers in pinball and beehives, how easy it is to use them and program them. Repairing a shower mixing valve without cutting a hole in the wall, be sure to turn off the water before you replace the mixing valve cartridge. Eric did put in a new shower mixing valve at his parents house, the video will be posted soon. Mike talks about being overwhelmed with success of a bootstrapped pinball project, and how what was once great is now a ball and chain. Eric tells of how one of his beehives swarmed and what he did to try to capture the beehive swarm. Lacking a tall ladder to retrieve the swarm cluster, swarm traps are brought out. Did it work? listen and learn.
photo by ppdigital
@rhkennerly
Sorry I missed the taping. But yes, I do go to bed early when I need to be in the greenhouse by 5 am. Otherwise, I'm laboring in the heat under plastic during the part of the day. A bonus of being there so early is that I can handpick the tomato worms and slugs that are still out at daylight.
Weighing hives. There may be more market than you thought for the electronic system, Mike.
I'm a "citizen scientist" in the NASA Honey Bee Net project.
http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/
I've got my big hive on an old farm grain store scale. I submit an xls spreadsheet logging the weight.
Satellite images show, but the bees data confirms, that "spring" has been advancing about 6 hours per year for the last decade. This has a lot of implications for migrating animals that arrive "late" for the bloom and are dependent on a particular species to survive. This also works the other way, plants are blooming earlier than bugs are hatching out to pollenate them.
Timing is everything.
@rhkennerly
@rhkennerly
Oh, data logging with CSV output would be great!
DrFood
Remember that swarming is the action of a happy and confident hive, so look on the bright side-- your bees are happy and confident! It is basically how they do the "be fruitful and multiply" thing.