Annemie Maes, from ONKO, a Belgian non-profit organization, has visited Valldaura for a few days and conducted the first part of the “Intelligent Beehives” workshop. Through that workshop, the interns have learned the bases of apiculture, beekeeping, and the nature of bees in general.
FabLab Academy students (Jonathan Minchin, John Rees and Ferran Masip) have been working for weeks, creating and building a replicable and adapted to the open-grid beehive. They built three of them, one to be located on the rooftop of Iaac, one for Valldaura, and one for ONKO. As well, those beehives will be filled with sensors (temperature, humidity, light and other factors) that the same FabLab students created and programmed. The sensorswill track changes inside the beehive and study how environmental factors affect the beehive and bees’ behavior, as well as how that data can be used as an environmental sensor itself.
The first of such special beehives was finished and carried to Valldaura. There, the interns, guided by Annemie Maes, finished the last assembling, placing the beehive in the area they had been preparing for it the previous days. Through the process, Maes conducted the first part of the workshop. Now, the beehive is set and ready, waiting for the swarming of local hives to have a new fresh one to be located in Valldaura.
