Gardening, Beekeeping, Livestock, Home-Ec, In the Kitchen, Mycology, Home Brewing
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Made by Hand no. 3 The Beekeeper
Tactical Urbanism
Tactical Urbanism
Known by many names, this emerging field of urban intervention, whether deemed tactical, temporary, guerrilla, pop-up, ad-hoc, DIY, or open-source, covers a range of projects from the officially sanctioned parklets of San Francisco and the pedestrianization of Times Square, to bottom-up projects such as street libraries in New York and guerrilla wayfinding in Raleigh. The topic will be explored in depth later this year at the Venice Biennale as the focus of the U.S. pavilion being organized by the Institute for Urban Design.
Arising out of funding challenges brought on by the recession, frustrations with the drawn-out approvals process, the organizational opportunities provided by the internet and social media, emerging technologies, and courageous designers, tactical urbanist projects are often defined by their low-cost temporary nature and require little or no approvals or environmental studies (or go without them anyway).
Whether driven from the bottom-up or the top-down, amateurs or professionals, legal means or questionable means, tactical urbanist projects are aimed at improving urban environments one intervention at a time.
2/1/11: The Age of DIY Urbanism
7/26/11: ‘Pop-Up’ Urbanity
8/7/11: “Pop-Up Cafes” Hit New York
12/22/11: The Growing Popularity of Temporary Architecture
1/1/12: Touring San Francisco’s Parklets: A New Urban Trend
2/9/12: Tactical Urbanism Lands in Raleigh
Bee Station
The Bee Station is handmade in England from weather resistant earthenware.It is a simple refuelling site for bees and doubles as a nesting site.
An earthenware ball with recesses in the feet that hold sugar water reservoirs provides a sheltered refuelling site for tired bees. Alternatively, adding straw or hay into the Bee Station dome provides a dry, safe environment for nesting bees (Bombus pratorum and Bombus horotorum in particular.)
Air ventilation holes at the back of the Station help provide plenty of oxygen while the ball design ensures rain water rolls away keeping your new bee family snug and toasty inside.
Open Source Ecology
The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.
Pop-up Fabrication of the Harvard Monolithic Bee
From National Public Radio: All Things Considered
Do bees, swarms of bees, make you nervous? Maybe not. Maybe they remind you of honey, flowers and warm summer days. You stay out of their way and they stay out of yours. What if, however, the bees weren’t bees at all but hundreds (or thousands) of autonomous microbots, facsimiles of the real thing, buzzing around in the real world?
That’s not Hollywood fantasy any more. It appears to be within reach. Researchers in the Microrobotics Lab at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences say that they expect their Robobees project will demonstrate flying, autonomous micro-air-vehicles modeled on insects within the next 2 1/2 years.
It won’t be easy, according to Rob Wood, the project’s principal investigator.
“The challenges that you get when you scale these things down mean that you have to reinvent everything, everything has to come from scratch, every one of the technologies,” Wood said in an interview last week. “There is nothing off the shelf.”
His team has recently taken a significant step forward with the demonstration of a manufacturing process that they believe will pave the way to industrial-scale production of microbots, spitting out thousands of them with ease.
Robotic bees!
Do bees, swarms of bees, make you nervous? Maybe not. Maybe they remind you of honey, flowers and warm summer days. You stay out of their way and they stay out of yours. What if, however, the bees weren’t bees at all but hundreds (or thousands) of autonomous microbots, facsimiles of the real thing, buzzing around in the real world?
That’s not Hollywood fantasy any more. It appears to be within reach. Researchers in the Microrobotics Lab at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences say that they expect their Robobees project will demonstrate flying, autonomous micro-air-vehicles modeled on insects within the next 2 1/2 years.
It won’t be easy, according to Rob Wood, the project’s principal investigator.
“The challenges that you get when you scale these things down mean that you have to reinvent everything, everything has to come from scratch, every one of the technologies,” Wood said in an interview last week. “There is nothing off the shelf.”
His team has recently taken a significant step forward with the demonstration of a manufacturing process that they believe will pave the way to industrial-scale production of microbots, spitting out thousands of them with ease.
Santrepol Roulant beekeeping collective Montreal
not ghosts!
i have started to make some bumble bee nesting boxes…here are the first prototypes!
1/4 scale formal explorations
A city a box a bee 