On the 23rd July, the “Bee In The City” event was launched by Manchester City Council

See https://beeinthecitymcr.co.uk/ for details

I’m probably not going to see many of these for real, but I thought I would like to own one, even just a small one….

So here is how I created my “Totally Unofficial Micro Bee In The City”!

Having taken a look at the basic geometry of the real Bee in the City from photographs I decided to create my own 3D model approximation of it using my favourite 3D Modelling Applcation… OpenSCAD!

The model is (mostly) built of primitives, almost exclusively spheres, stretched and squashed and sliced to the various dimensions required – only the abdomen with its slot-strips, and the wings with a very specific profile were built using an X/Y approach.

Having got to the point where I had a decent shrunken down facsimile of the real thing, today 3rd August I decided to print the model using my CEL Robox 3D-Printer – nearly four years old now, this fantastic piece of kit has never let me down.  The closest you can get to a Commodity Fit-and-Forget 3D Printer, mine has received literally NO maintenance since the day I bought it – I follow a simple regime of a wipe of the printbed with IPA before every print.

Printed in medium quality, 20% fill and with supports (so that the overhanging head, abdomen and wings print ok) each Micro Bee is taking about an hour and a half to print and consumes about four metres of 1.75mm PLA fllament

And the end result (as printing finishes) is this!

Cleaning off the support here is the final result

I’m really rather impressed how it came out!

Next one on its way… a blue one this time!

I think I’m going to bee busy over the next few days printing more of instances of my “Micro Bee In The City”!