I am setting up a live beehive cam and I think I may be the first to do it? I have a wireless Linksys camera for the job. I will have it set up for 24 hour and 7 day a week viewing on the web.
However it is not weather proof. I am going to start out by putting it outside the hive at the entrance and then as weather permits and spring comes back around I am going to put it in the hive or make an OB hive and the camera will look thru the glass wall to see the bees live. I need some ideas to make this work. I will have to get permission from the Moderators here to make a web link to the camera. I will probabably place the hive and camera under a tenet to begin with. Moderators I will need some help here also.
Sounds awesome! Are you certain the camera sending signals won't interfere with the bees? Probably not but worth checking into.
It would be disappointing to sit there and watch your bees take off during the winter because of CCD on the internet.
"Oh look...there they go! :-x
i don't think you are the first but its a good thing to do anyway. since its dark inside the hive i'm not sure how having it inside the hive is going to work.
I've played with doing something like this and a couple of problems come up
assuming you want to take pics of the inside of the hive
1) cameras need lots of light which bees don't care for
2) if you're shooting pictures through glass the light makes a lot of glare
here are a couple pics of my attempts with a regular camera
http://www.drobbins.net/bee%27s/window/window.html
Dave
I am just going to place the camera outside the hive for now, with a standard light on it for night viewing. All you will see is the bees in the day come and go. If I place a camera in the hive I will use inferred lighting that sould not bother the bees? If anyone has done this here before at Beemaster.com please post a link to the article or if anone has one somewhere else on the web post a link.
google "live bee cam"
you'll get a couple of hits
http://www.hivetool.com/webcam/index.shtml
http://www.draperbee.com/webcam/beecam.htm
http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/beecam/
Dave
Howdy,
Try one of the zero lux cameras like you see on ghost hunters. That way you can watch them even in the dark. ;)
Also bee careful if you get a lot of traffic your ISP may become suspcious and block your internet access.
That would be nice to have a bee cam. :)
I think that is cool. I am interested in how it's done.
Once I get permission to post a URL here I will give you guys a web link. I will set up the hive cam this weekend. I hope the moderators here will do a sticky on it where the post and the link will stay at the front of the fourm and in bold.
i have played around and built some other cams... here are some random thoughts for you:
- consider using an LED for light... no heat, should be bright enough, and it draws so little power you should be able to run it off the camera power. if you are clever enough, you could make it remotely switchable!;
- build the housing for the camera to be weathertight. look in the stores for some of the air/water tight food containers and then cut in a nice apature for a glass window for the lens to see through;
- connecting the cam back to your computer will be something to engineer!
- look for software that will capture frames and compile them in to 'stop-action' movies... i am not current on the packages, but they are nice and many of them are automatic.
- let us know when you have something working! sounds like a cool project! good luck
Web cams cause CCD. I read it on the internet.
You're better off getting an observation hive instead. You can see more and as often as you want. :)
I ran a test on the beehive cam, it works great when I have 4 or less viewers after that it bottlenecks my internet connection to where I can't even get online. My DSL Connection does'nt have enough band width to support a lot of viewers. Back to the drawing board. I would go cable but I have over a year to go on my DSL contract. :-P
Interested, How would one go about this I have a 3Mg broadband service. Would like to show how I will work my queen rearing next year. Or how not to do it as the case may bee....lolololol...
regarding your Internet service: you might want to look in to what the bandwidth is "upstream" from your connection. most residential services have greater download speed than upload speed, and when you try to serve up a video stream, you swamp your 'upstream' connection. also note that many service providers prohibit setting up a server on a residential circuit.
so - how to get around this? consider compiling time-delay movies, uploading them to a public video server, and showing "almost real time" bee movies. this is a lot of work, but streaming video is a lot of work and has technical challenges that are not trivial.
good luck!