HornePocalypse
Simulation render: the white turret beside a row of beehives in a sunlit Maltese limestone courtyard.

Simulation

Watching for hornets

Total Buzzkill.

A turret that learns to defend Malta’s beehives from the Oriental hornet. Designed with AI, trained on a phone, tested in simulation.

How it works Talks and workshops

01 · The threat

Malta’s bees are being hunted.

The Oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis) hovers at the hive entrance and snatches bees as they fly home.

59.5%

of surveyed Maltese beekeepers lost colonies to hornets in 2024. Double the year before.

Survey of 37 beekeepers, The Maltese Herald, 29 Sep 2026

Field notesVespa orientalis
Maltese
il-bagħal taż-żunżan
Size
Workers up to 23 mm, queens up to 35 mm
Season
Late April to mid-November

Sources: The Maltese Herald (name); Mississippi State University Extension (size); University of Malta, 2021 (season).

02 · The turret

Designed by talking to an AI.

We described it. Claude drove FreeCAD and modelled it: 23 printed parts merged into 14, the main arm shaped by topology optimisation and stress-checked.

Simulation render: the white turret on a dark background, lit by a low warm sun, a lime-green collar on its barrel.

Simulation

Turret V1 · rendered from the CAD
Turret V1At a glance
Aim
90° side to side, 90° up and down
Eyes
Three cameras
Reach
About 5 m
Fires
Biodegradable gel balls, over 98% water

Safety lock on

Drawn to the millimetre.

Assembly sheets generated straight from the CAD model: every part numbered, the pan bearings cut open.

  • Assembly drawing, section A–A: the pan bearing stack cut open, with the hub, bearings, pulley and M8 pan bolt numbered.

    Section A–A · pan bearing stack · 1:2

  • Assembly drawing, isometric view: the yoke on its pan hub, with the tilt motor on one arm.

    Yoke on its pan hub · 1:3

  • Assembly drawing, isometric view of the whole turret, its three sub-assemblies numbered.

    General assembly · 1:5

  • Assembly drawing, plan view: the turret from above on its four legs, with the pan travel marked 50° each way.

    Plan · 50° to each hard stop · 1:4

  • Assembly drawing, base with its shell removed: the pan drive, Raspberry Pi, controller and wide camera, numbered.

    Base, shell off · 1:2

03 · The simulator

A whole apiary in your pocket.

Hives, bees, hornets and passers-by in 3D, with the real turret on guard. Fully offline.

Watch it learn.

Same hornets, two brains: untrained, and after 23,800 practice rounds. One run, not an average.

Scroll to play

Simulation, side by side: the untrained turret hits 0 of 5 hornets and 9 bees are lost; after 23,800 practice rounds it hits all 5 and 2 bees are lost. The turret hits no bees in either.

Frozen in mid-air.

Slowed 100×: the gel ball leaves the barrel and stops a breath from the hornet.

Scroll to play

Simulation: a slow-motion replay of a gel ball flying past the hives towards a hovering Oriental hornet, stopping just before it arrives.

Simulation

7.3 mm ball · 52 m/s · 45 ms to the hornet

The app · Android

Get it by QR code at a talk.

04 · Training

It teaches itself to aim.

Nobody codes the aim. A small neural network tries, misses and improves. Train one on your own phone.

23,800

practice rounds behind the demo model

The brainNeural network
Sees
444 numbers per step
Thinks
256 neurons
Decides
Pan, tilt and fire: 16 outputs
Learns by
PPO: trial and error

Share a brain by QR code.

  • ~11 s screen to camera, no internet Phone screen to laptop webcam
  • ~41 KB the whole model

It thought bees were birds.

Off the shelf, a detector called bees “bird”. After 33 minutes of training on mostly Maltese footage, it never confidently mistook a bee for a hornet.

  • 0.83 hornet detection score
  • 0.90 bee detection score
  • 54 ms per frame, laptop CPU

AP@0.5 on footage it never trained on

05 · Safety

People in view? It won’t fire.

A hard lock blocks firing whenever a person is in view. It’s a rule, not something the AI learns.

  • PeopleFiring locked.Locked
  • LasersReflections could hurt the bees.Rejected
  • HardwareSimulation only, for now.Simulation

What it is

Every tool behind it, from the AI that designed the turret to the phone that trains it, is one you can use today.

What it isn’t

A product. Beekeepers are losing hives, and we won’t overpromise.

06 · Learn more

See it live.

More dates coming.

  1. Total Buzzkill

    DevFest 2026, GDG Malta · Birkirkara, Malta

    Talk

  2. Total Buzzkill

    DevFest Münster 2026, GDG Münster · Münster, Germany

    Workshop