Wednesday Caption

Here's one of our old favourites. This was taken in the early days of Bright Beehive as a company and by Nick as a beekeeper.

This is one of the thousands of bees that Nick has. What you are not able to see here is the nervousness I had when dealing with these wondrous beasts. I had a fear of bees which has largely subsided over the past couple of years. 

I particularly love this photo. (Shame I didn't shave that day.)

Special thanks to Andy and Peter for last week's entries.

Image by Bright Beehive

Beekeeping And Social Computing

I am new to beekeeping and decided to build a hive from a flatpack kit, mainly to get a deeper appreciation of what the hive is about.  It took 12 hours to build a workable hive - making the base, the "lifts", the roof, the "supers" and each of about 40 individual brood or honey frames. Instructions to build a frameThe instructions were good(ish) - but output oriented as opposed to "how to". However there were so many repetitive tasks where I eventually found a more effective way to do it than the way I started.  If I had started the way I ended up doing it, I think the build time would have been closer to 8 hours. I volunteered to write up an article on my experience for my local beekeping association - passing on a few of those tips, to save the next person, or maybe a future me, those hours.  But what an application for Social Computing: maybe an entry in a beekeeping wiki; definitely a candidate for a YouTube entry, particularly for those lifts that the instructions said push together, but where I found a large rubber mallet to be the only way to get the joints together.  You really need to see it to believe that this is the right approach :-)  Flickr photos to show the angle of attack to put the fiddly little tacks into the frames so that they did not poke out the other side. Hindsight is a wonderful thing - I did not think of this in the excitement of getting the flatpack hive delivered.  Actually I did not know this approach would be of use until well into construction, and by then I just wanted to finish, not least so that it would be ready to accept a swarm. The idea of applying some social computing tools to make this task easier is still valid, but now I have to wait until someone else has a flatpack kit ready to assemble.  Then I can annotate my first draft wiki article with photos and videos of intermediate stages, so others can learn and then augment that learning. It is a mindset thing - I think of how to apply social computing when "at work",  but when in home or rural mode it is not the first thing to cross my mind, nor "has anyone else done this already?" :-(