Karl's Bees
Welcome to my site. I'm relatively new to beekeeping, 2024 will be my third year. I'm located in Lothian Maryland which is about 15 miles south of Annapolis. This site is just getting started. Right now the only thing here is information on my BeeCam, a honey bee nature camera.
During my first year of beekeeping I put a Google Nest security camera in front of one of my hives. I was fascinated with all their activities and the camera let me check up on them when I was stuck behind a desk at work.
Unfortunately the camera couldn't always keep up with the bee's fast movements; I would just see a pixilated mess. It could also only capture one hive at a time and it was either too close (but good for morning closeups) or too far away (but good for viewing orientation flights). So last year I upgraded the camera and got better images. But it still didn't feel good enough, so I tried another upgrade. And thus began my decent into webcam madness. I finally settled on a fancy Axis PTZ security camera that can zoom in/out and switch between hives.
I'm still playing with the setup, but it's LIVE streaming on YouTube now, 24x7. Take a look. You can read more about it on my BeeCam page.