The Beehive.
Pointed at the landing board of one hive out of the row. You can count the bees going in and out, which turns out to be a genuinely useful measure of whether the colony is any good.
- Angle
- Fixed · macro · 0.9 m
- Live
- All year · Best April to August
- Uptime, 90 days
- 99.0%
What it is actually pointed at.
The camera sits ninety centimetres from the entrance of hive four, on a post, angled down. It is the only close-focus camera on the estate and the only one where the subject is smaller than the bracket holding the camera up.
Traffic at the entrance tracks the season closely enough to be worth watching: near nothing in January, a steady stream by late April, a queue on a warm July afternoon, and orientation flights that look like chaos and are not.
The honey goes into Bee Juice at £12.20 a jar. Normal farms sell honey. That name was not our idea and we would not have improved on it.
Worth watching when.
| When | What you get |
|---|---|
| A warm afternoon, April to August | Peak traffic. Foragers in with full pollen baskets, orange and yellow on the legs. |
| Midday, late spring | Orientation flights. Young bees hovering in front of the entrance, learning where home is. |
| A cold snap | Nothing. The colony clusters and the board stays empty for days. |
| Late summer | Wasps at the entrance, and guards dealing with them. |
Across the year, on this camera.
Very little.
Cleansing flights on the first warm day, and that is the news.
The build-up, and the weeks a swarm is most likely.
Peak traffic, and the honey that becomes Bee Juice.
Winding down, feeding, and the mouse guard going on.
The rig on this one.
The Beehive
- Mount
- Post, 0.9 m from the landing board
- Lens
- Close focus, fixed
- Stream
- 720p at 25 fps, 1.4 Mbps
- Subject
- Hive four of six
- Night
- Off. Bees do not fly and infrared is not welcome
- Uptime, 90 days
- 99.0%
Uptime is the rolling ninety-day figure. When the stream is not available this page shows the last good frame instead: A stamped still of the board, which in February is indistinguishable from the live feed.
The four things every camera here promises.
Fixed
No pan, tilt or zoom for anybody outside the farm office.
Silent
No audio on this camera or any other.
Pointed at us
No footpath, no neighbour’s land, no public highway in frame.
Fallback
A stamped still of the board, which in February is indistinguishable from the live feed.
The other cameras.
Nine others, all fixed, all silent, all pointed at this farm.
What is worth watching this month.
A table of the whole year, camera by camera, so you are not opening ten tabs to find the one with something in it.
