Design and test of three-pin clip-picking royal jelly larvae sorting machine

Abstract: The royal jelly pick worm is a process that must be completed before harvesting pulp. Because of the larvae of bee are small and in a great deal of numbers, the labor intensity of the manual sorting process is very large. Moreover, the aging of Chinese beekeeping workforce is becoming increasingly serious in the bee keeping industry, and now the royal jelly picking worm have not yet reached mechanization, which hinders the production of royal jelly. In this paper, we developed a method for the present situation of Chinese beekeeping in a three-needle structural picking machine, which would not affect the quality of the royal jelly. First, the machine put the queen cell without beeswax one by one into the king's guide slot, then turned the pedal, the drive shaft was turned by pulley, and the main shaft would transfer the power to the drive unit and the picking worm unit. The toothed belt of the transmission unit transmitted the queen cell to the picking insect unit. Because of the its own weight, the queen cell which in guide groove was falling, implement automatic supply of queen cell, the action of picking worm was completed by pick worm unit, then bee larvae are collected by the insect collecting box. The queen cell was sent out after picking worm, thus finish the picking worm process. This device was easy to operate and had compact structure, suitable for the field operation for beekeepers. The machine was mainly used to construct the whole machine scheme of the three needles pick worm. The three needles were evenly distributed in the inner wall of queen cell, and at the same time, it also had a centripetal movement to clamp or loosen the bee. The three-needle mechanism was used for the coordination between the space sheave and cam mechanism, and the parameters of the space tank wheel and cam were calculated. The force situation of the foot pedal of the power input was obtained through finite element analysis. Finally, the arc length of the space slot was 7.5 PI, and the groove depth was 20.68 mm. The theoretical profile and work profile of the cam were obtained. The finite element analysis of the foot pedal was concluded that the actual stress was much less than the allowable stress of the material itself, which indicated that the method met the requirement of use. The experimental comparison and economic benefit of the artificial picking insects and the robot were summarized as follows: the machine will control the rate of worm picking at 10/min, 10 times the efficiency of manual sorting. The machine in royal jelly, royal jelly larvae preserved and did not affect the quality under the premise of one-time whole queen cell bee larvae all picked out of a hole (64), which realized continuous operation, greatly improved the efficiency of the pick of royal jelly, overcame long manual work time and labor intensity. It was very helpful to expand the scale of bee keeping in China.