My oldest daughter was a wild sleeper, so the tooth never stayed under her pillow. It was awful trying to search her bed for the damn thing without waking her. One time I couldn't find her tooth at all, and she found it the next day. I had to convince her that the tooth fairy messed up, and it went back under her pillow for a bonus dollar.
Looks like your kids and their friends are smart to have people thinking that. This is what the going rate is according to online.
Lol everyone does. I'm personally not a fan of the flow hive, as it promotes "lazy" beekeeping, or honey-centric beekeeping. The idea is that you can put it out in the yard and have free, fresh honey whenever you want...But there's a laundry list of complications about it. It's pretty popular on /r/beekeeping as a debate topic. It's usually the people who aren't beekeepers talking about how useful it would be and how everyone else is just exaggerating, and the beekeepers trying in vain to explain the problems with it. Quick rundown: Spoiler Bees can't survive on their own because of Varroa mites (and other things). They require constant maintenance and treatment by beekeepers or they'll die. This product was developed in Australia, the only varroa-free area on earth. They didn't build in easy ways to disassemble/inspect/maintain the hive. There are some diseases like AFB that the only treatment is to dig a hole on the spot, throw the hive in, and burn it, then bury the ashes. It's an extremely dangerous disease that can wipe out hundreds of square miles worth of bees if not found early (through inspection, which is difficult). This hive is made partially of plastic, which A: is poisonous to burn, and B: encourages people to "just keep it and clean it out" because the "spores can't penetrate the plastic", which might be true, but is still a HUGE risk. Honey isn't something that you can just go out, tap, and close off again. The hive works by breaking the cells the honey is stored in, releasing it all at once. You'd have to harvest the full thing. Related to above, honey isn't an instantly-ready thing. It takes time to "cap" honey...The bees store nectar, then mix enzymes with it and evaporate out water to make honey (over-simplified, but still). It's not done all at once...but you have to harvest it all at once. Honey with too high of a moisture content (IE if only part of the frame is honey, and part is not-quite-honey) will ferment, go bad, or mold. I see no way of cleaning this bad boy. The bees will do a good job, but there's some areas they can't get to by design (the honey channels, etc). They'll remove the wax cappings, clean the plastic, but how will they get inside? I can just see that becoming a breeding ground for bacteria (honey that's not honey can grow it), sticky gooey mess, etc. Probably one of the more important beekeeper facts nobody knows (who's not a beekeeper). The video shows the whole process sped up drastically (honey is super slow, especially at room temperature or cooler). You'd have to have honey exposed to the air for a long time; honey flowing through channels, into the jars, sitting int he jars, etc. You can seal up as much as possible, but most people don't/won't. Having exposed honey can start a "robbing frenzy" in your apiary, where all the other bees in the area will force their way into your hive and steal all the nectar/honey out of it, leaving your bees weakened, hungry, and with no food to make it through the winter It encourages "honey-centric" beekeeping, which is "I don't care how the bees are doing as long as I get my honey." I support and encourage ANYONE to become a beekeeper (email at bee@ns4t.net if you want info), but there's a catch: I want healthy bees helping pollinate, I don't want unhealthy, unmanaged bees. Bees cannot survive on their own for long; afb, efb, deformed wing virus, varroa mites, tracheal mites, small hive beetles, wax moths, mice, nosema...all of these are dangerous diseases/parasites, and that's not including temperature, wind, humidity, food, water, pollen...all the things that are required to get a hive through the year. It's basically like a pet, you have to take care of it, not just throw it outside and hope it can fend for itself. The Flow Hive encourages people to raise bees for honey alone...You have to be interested in the bees as organisms and what they do for nature and want to keep them healthy so they can do it, not just so that you get honey. Don't get me wrong, I'm super excited about getting honey next year. This year, I probably could have taken a frame or two, but I didn't because I know they need it for the winter. I don't think flow hive owners would be that conscientious. That's all I could think of, but there's even more. I'm only in my first year, so I haven't experienced a lot. Others who are more experienced are even more vehemently against it, some are on the fence. We won't really know until it's been around for 2-3 seasons and we see how it goes, maybe all the fears are unfounded and it is time for a change...beekeeping has been the same since 1851 (invention of the langstroth hive...the standard "bee box")...whether that's because it's the most mutually beneficial way, or just because nobody else has innovated in the niche space remains to be seen.
The cinder block has always been there. There's one on the tiny hive on the right that's just barely in frame too (though that hive is dying; no queen, no brood, just waiting for the last few bees to die off before I freeze the box for next season). I was just worried that the cinder block wouldn't be enough in 40mph winds with a giant column of a wind sail of a box.
lolwat...we got quarters or dimes, depending on the tooth/quantity of teeth. I think the most I ever got for a tooth was like $0.75. Our family was pretty poor back then though, so I'm glad I got that much XD
For the first few teeth, the kids got 4 quarters or another assortment of silver coins. 'Cause, you know, the more coins, the richer they are. Doesn't work so well once they start losing molars. So we upped the ante....one gold one dollar coin. lol
Oh yes I totally remember the oh so gentle search for the tooth! Sounds like you had it bad with a wild sleeper tho
We were broke, and we got a quater for a tooth. But at that age, a quarter at the penny candy store was like heaven.
Wow! Bubble busted. To the lay person it looks like an amazing thing but seeing your insight I see it probably has a long way to go. The idea of it is probably good just needs some re-engineering.
ALL TO is down, I remember the announcement now. They're down today to switch servers, so you'll have to disable TO on scraper because it's not handling the down properly (it's timing out instead of giving an error code, so you have to wait for the timeouts, which takes forever). I agree, completely. There should be some innovation, but maybe this isn't the right one. It needs people in a varroa area to tinker with it.