# New "Colorado" TBH - open source CNC design hives



## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

We're in the dawn of a new era. CNC-designed Top-Bar Hives for the masses. (And Warres, too, if you're into that kind of thing.)

I'm not involved directly, and I barely know enough to follow the conversation, but several people I know are excited about this development.

Vocabulary: 

"Open Source" - means the plans are freely available and improved by a loose group of people who get involved, often via the internet.
"Crowd funding" - raising money by appealing (via the internet, of course) for support for a worthy cause
"Computer Numerical Control" - the design plans are fed from a computer into a machine that cuts the wood into pieces that can be fit together to make a hive.
So here's a blurb from their facebook publicity:

*Download a Beehive.*
We’ve designed two beehives you can download for free and cut using a CNC routing machine in about an hour. All you need is the files, a sheet of plywood and a CNC routing machine. Download our free beehive files at: www.opensourcebeehives.net​
And from their webpage:

The Open Source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world. The project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way, to monitor and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory kit, The Smart Citizen Kit (SCK), which can transmit to an open data platform: Smartcitizen.me

These sensor enhanced hive designs are open and freely available online, the data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations allowing for a further comparison and analysis of the hives.​
The general idea is to make the plans freely available to anyone who has access to CNC machines, and to sell the crowd-funded "Smart Citizen Kit (SCK)" to whoever wants to add that device.

The first problem I can see is that they want to cut the entire hive from one 4'x8' sheet of plywood, which results in a hive that's about 2 feet long. 14 bars. The whole thing has started up so quickly, and they're talking about 100s of new beekeepers, so pretty soon a lot of people are going to realize the hive is _rather_ small.

But once that's resolved (when they develop plans that use more than one sheet of plywood) then we're looking at a new wave of 21st-century beekeepers. The open data platform adds a new twist, with some of that conversation spilling over into other forums.

Oh, and P.S., the Open Source Beehive people have already raised $60,000 by crowd funding, according to someone more involved than me. Who says you can't make money in beekeeping?


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