Comment by Jedd
4 years ago
I've been meaning to write up an 'Ask HN' style question around using something similar to combat a common beekeeping pest called the Small Hive Beetle (SHB).
This is a small (5mm) black beetle that comes into beehives, usually around dusk, and causes massive havoc, can easily wipe out colonies quite quickly.
It arrived in Australia about 15 years ago, but is common almost everywhere else in the world now. There's lots of control mechanisms, but they're all incomplete (traps, nematodes in soil around the hive, mesh layers they can be pushed / fall through but bees can't fit through, etc).
A laser unit sitting in front of a hive, perhaps with an extended landing pad, seems like an excellent use case for an approach like yours.
So, if you're bored, and want to save the (beekpeeing) world ... ? : )
I was doing some reading up on beehives and it looks like there's generally a single entrance to a hive? This could simplify things since if there's a reduced area to guard its possible to control/protect that area to prevent stray lasers.
I discovered a product called the guardian https://guardianbhe.com/ which is mounted by the entrance to a hive and uses red light to obscure that entrance. Wouldn't a similar configuration work, except instead of red light it would incinerate any intruders?
I guess it mainly just comes down to rapid recognition of the beetle. With that kind of info one could hook up any number of deterrents.
Alternatively, if not rapid recognition of the beetle, rapid recognition of bees and just zap anything else.
With a doorway-guard system it could maybe even be done with a tesla-coil-esque thing
Yup, almost always a single entrance, wide (~30cm) though lots of people put in reducers as that's way more space than almost any colony needs, and narrow (about 1cm high). There's usually a small strip pad there to land on, though bees can hover, and don't really need that pad - it's typically 2-5cm deep.
A good candidate for an active defence system as the bees usually take at least a second from landing to getting inside, and a camera / laser could be mounted immediately above and restricted to a straight-down view (so quite safe for humans).
The guardian tool looks similar to something I recently bought, but have not attached to my hive yet[1]. It relies more on the physical mesh (being small enough beetles fall or can be pushed through) than the red colour, I think. The floor inside of my hives are also mesh, similarly sized, but made of metal -- beneath that is a shallow tray of cooking oil.
Personally I don't yet have a baseline for how much of this pest I'm going to have to deal with, but am adopting a 'whatever I can do' approach from the beginning, as their numbers, once inside the hive, can grow very rapidly.
Within my hives I have also have small oil-based traps sitting up higher in the boxes, again that bees can't fit through, but beetles can. Because bees will typically chase the beetles - they can't remove or sting them - and the beetles will try to find safety in crevices, which is the basis of most of these trap types.
[1] https://hornsby-beekeeping.com/beetle-off-entrance-hive-beet...
thank that provide details
yes, exactly. I considered it. It is very easy to do.
I approve your optimism, while doubting it would be at all easy for me to try to do.
You would have no shortage of beta testers, and in the hobby / home space I would expect the market to be significant. Commercial hive operators, I'm less sure about how the economics would play out there.
There's at least one other pest that's large enough to be a good candidate for this approach - the wax moth.
There's plenty of other pests, but they're typically small and hitch a ride on bees, (eg varroa mite) so terminator gene really is our most hopeful solution for many of those.
your right
for Asian Hornet)