Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, bees can and do live in the nature. But so can a dog, a cat or even a man live in the jungle, but its quality of life is worse, because nature is harsh environment. Especially with varroa mites that got all over the world with global trade.

In the nature bees have much less chance of survival, because it is hard to find natural shelter, be protected from bears and rodents. Typically its inside of the trunks of trees, but they are not sufficienly large enough with deforestation.

• True, it's a premium device compared to regular beehives with manual inspections

• We value human effort (💪🏻Physical labor, 👁️Observability of bee colony) which has increasing cost and high complexity

• Cost of chips and hardware is decreasing and gets more specialized. In bulk numbers, consumer product will get cheap, making automation more preferable

• For a single colony, 🧿Robotic Beehive does cost a lot, thats why we want to make price-per-colony less with 🪬Robotic Apiary that should handle multiple colonies at once

Its charity for small beekeepers. But its also a trial program to get paying customers without the need to pay immediately for the product they did not try out.

True, we do not want to replace human-bee interaction, nor replace beekeepers. We are adding a freedom to control level of intrusion and reduce death of bees caused by inspections. Human is still in the loop.

True, we do not have autonomy yet. Our first 👁️‍🗨️Entrance Observer versions rely on local infrastructure and its beekeeper’s extra headache for now. However, 4G internet modem is pretty easy to buy and install for the entire apiary, share wifi and flexibly manage cellular payments.

For the full autonomy we have it marked as 🔌Energy autonomy (battery + solar cells + wind) but until then we assume that beekeeper can run a wire from nearby socket using extension cables.

Most likely yes, we don’t have this data yet and our focus is not on honey itself directly. Honey is a result of efficient and strong bee colony. That is our main focus - 👁️Observability of bee colony so that it stays strong from 🦀Infestation of Varroa mite.

Multiple reasons, main one is because its part of the 🫀Culture and values. But more specific:

1. This is good for the 🐝 bees as the code is public, anyone can contribute to improving their life, not only researchers

2. This is good for the ⚽Team , because engineers can inspect code before they join the company and after they leave, keeping their contribution legacy publicly available and trackable. We can also easier find volunteers.
   1. This is good for the company to have transparency of released features

3. This helps us to stay 💶 financially lean by avoiding commercial licensing of sub-components, such as Ultralytics yolo model, Grafana and keep all of our code under AGPL.
   And because anyone can contribute for free, we also benefit from it
   

4. This is good for the 🍯Products - anyone can report security vulnerability and even fix it, without the explicit need of dedicated security programs (such as hackerone)

5. This is good for our clients and beekeeping community, because they can be confident that their product vendor does not lock them out of their data to charge exorbitant prices.

6. This is good for 💶 investors at initial phases, because they can see
   1. that product exists and is functional
   2. no matter what happens to the company founders 💀, code is still available for the project to live on and benefit the bees
   3. frequency and contribution of the developers & community traction

7. Because we are confident and proud to be the leader in beekeeping tech and are not afraid of competition. But if you are, we have some 🛡️Business risk protection plan

🏇🏻Competition shows there is demand and a supply of different solutions for beekeepers ready to pay

🔬Research & science also shows variety of human interest towards understanding bees

We have users naturally registering to try out the web-app. See 🌍Marketing Statistics for the estimates