The Brisky Booth

Photographing bees can be difficult. Keep them cool and they will slow down enough for you to catch a cool shot. With Brisky Booth you can control the volume, temperature and angle of the booth.

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We were inspired to do this project because nature photography is an exciting hobby! Studying nature and capturing its beauty should never be damaging to its ecosystem. Animals, bees, and other insects should be left unharmed after observation.

This «Brisky Booth» bee photobooth is a clear box built from acrylic plastic, which has a graduated lever to control the volume where the bee will be placed. The mobile inside wall contains a cooling device that drops the temperature in the booth enough to slow down the bees, to allow a clean shot to be taken, while leaving the bees unharmed. In the center of the mobile wall, there is room to stick a sweet treat for the bees to enjoy - this orients the bees toward the wall, opposite from the door. This allows the photographer to capture a picture of the back of the bees. The sliding door feature on the bottom of the box is useful for easily releasing the bees and can even be quickly removed to allow the camera to get a closer look at the bee. This booth can stand upward, or can be turned on the side for better picture angles.

We built this booth using acrylic plastic traced by a laser cutter. We designed all the pannels and glued the walls together using hot glue.

Originally, our idea was to use a 12V thermoelectric cooling system (which is essentially the electronic part of a mini fridge) for the «cooling» aspect of the booth, since the temperature control is more accurate and battery powered, but, this material was not available to us, so we had to improvise and use a reusable ice pack. Since the direction of the cold air of the icepack cannot be controlled as thoroughly as the one of the electric cooling system, we added sponges to isolate the sides of the box to make sur that most of the cool air would be directed toward the bees.

We are glad that we were able to make a rough prototype of our idea and spend time in the lab learning about laser cutting. Coming up with ideas and improvising along the way made this task very enjoyable.

The team was not familiar with laser cutting, so we had a few difficulties getting the cuts right. We learned about inkscape and laser cutting, and even got to learn a few cool facts about bees! Did you know that there are over 20 000 species of bees in the world?

The Brisky Booth is an idea built around portable battery cooling systems for bees, so we could definetaly see this becoming an idea starter.

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