Haven’t written in a while; we’ve been continuing our research, and preparing for our bees… A few weeks ago, we went to Conrads Farm (cool place) and hung out with the bees, as he demo-ed a package install.
We pickup our Nucs this coming Saturday (Yay!)
Here are some early spring pictures of our bee yard, and some of the flowers we see… I’m trying to determine if any of the Prairie seeds we planted in December are sprouting, but I have no idea what I’m doing!
I can recognize only one of the flowers that are in the pictures above (the wild strawberry), so if you have any idea what the others are, please share.
Began fiddling with the Broodminder products that I bought at the conference at Tolles Technical (in Plain City) during winter. Really neat product. I didn’t know that the weight unit also provides external temperature and external humidity. So, with the “complete” units that we bought, we get hive-internal humidity and temperature data AND external humidity and temperature data, and hive weight; this is going to be a cool way to quantify what our hives are doing.
So, with Broodminder, you install the app on your iPhone, walk by the hives, select the unit, and sync up. You have the option to sync real-time, or on the device’s schedule (which you can also set to 5, 15, or 60 minutes recording time); really cool. Then, you can upload data to the “beekeeper.io” site, or you can export a .csv (Excel) OR the sql-lite database format (you email it).
Here is my only issue though: we were building an empty hive with the Broodminder weight unit, to get a record of how much the equipment weighs (an empty, painted, no frames, 10 frame, medium super weighs (for example) about 3.16 pounds), and we setup the device to provide real-time data; cool right? Then I exported the .csv data, AND the sql-lite data (whole database)….
Well, let’s just say that after seeing the lack of complete data in the .csv file, and AFTER I installed DBBrowser for SQLite (for Mac of course), I discovered that the data is complete in the database, but the .csv data is certainly lacking……..So, my advice is to get your favorite data reader for SQLite, and export / email THAT format of data, so as to not to be disappointed.
Other than that, I do like the Broodminder products and would recommend them; now let’s see how long these batteries last.
I will take pictures and hopefully have more data to share starting Saturday (when we get out bees)!!!