THE INTEGRAL URBAN HOUSE

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We have estimated that in a 15-mile-per-hour wind, the Savonius can cycle 1.5 gallons of water per minute through the filter. Though seemingly not a great amount of pumping power, eight hours of pumping will circulate nearly 750 gallons of water, or one-third of the pond's volume, which is our optimum design consideration.

Beekeeping is one of those hobbies that can be self-supporting, at least to the degree that the household consumes home-produced honey instead of granulated cane or beet sugar bought at the store. Keeping hives in some metropolitan regions can be even more productive than in some rural locations . . . because city people often maintain ornamental plants that bloom more frequently than farm crops, and thus provide nectar and pollen for a larger portion of the year.

The great importance of bees in pollinating crops is rarely understood by city dwellers, whose primary reaction to these insects is often fear of being stung. A number of cities have restrictive ordinances against beekeeping primarily to protect citizens from being stung. But the fact is, less than 1% of the population has an allergic reaction to insect stings. For people who do have extreme reactions, the best policy to follow is individual desensitization, a successful procedure available through allergy clinics and doctors who specialize in treating allergies. For the vast majority of people, the likelihood of being stung is slight, and the fear of the possibility is all out of proportion to the consequences.

In spite of occasional prohibitory ordinances, many people do keep bees in urban and suburban areas. These beekeepers quickly learn to make their hives inconspicuous by keeping them hidden or painting them unobtrusive colors. Gifts of honey or beeswax candles may help to make neighbors friendly, as gifts of fresh eggs may do in regard to raising chickens. When a town near us reviewed its laws prohibiting beekeeping recently, some 30 residents who were already keeping hives appeared before the city council and had all the legal constraints repealed.

At the Berkeley Integral Urban House, preliminary experiments showed that fish would eat dead bees. To make this fact useful, a beehive was mounted over a pond so that when bees died they fell into the water and thus became a supplementary protein source for the animals within. This arrangement takes advantage of the normal process of bees dying. A strong hive of sixty thousand bees will have an average daily mortality rate of 1.5 percent during the periods of peak activity. This means that as many as a thousand bees per day can die in heavy honey-flow periods in the spring. This bee-fish combination exemplifies the integration principle by which systems that may be net losers from an energy, labor, or economic point of view can—when combined—provide a net gain.

STEAM 'N' SIMMER

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