Gly Hudson's system monitors a beehive's overall health. (Image Credit: Gly Hudson)
These days you can build all sorts of creative projects with Raspberry Pi, including a beehive monitoring system! That's the idea behind Gly Hudson's invention, BeeHive, a device he developed to track the hive's interior and exterior temperature to help determine the colony's health. Since the system is too far to establish internet connectivity, Gly installed a low-power RF sensor connected to an Arduino inside the hive to capture readings. A Raspberry Pi, which connects to the internet, collects this data. The beehive has a DS18B20 temperature sensor along with the Arduino. All the data captured by the system can be viewed online thanks to the open-source software providing a data-logging and graphing platform. BeeHive, costing approximately $55 to set up, gets its power from an old car battery and a small solar PV panel.
(Image Credit: bernswaelz/pixabay)
Solutionbee also developed a hive-monitoring system called B-ware, which precisely records outdoor hive temperature and weight every 15 minutes. B-ware also sends out an alert if it detects intrusion, swarming, or other colony issues. Owners can use the remotely connected data collector or smartphone app to read data. Afterward, the data is uploaded to the cloud for real-time analysis.
This system, which integrates into a beehive, monitors a hive's health and productivity. (Image Credit: beehivemonitoring)
Beekeepers will love beehivemonitoring's sustainable system that monitors bee colonies! With this 100% biological technology, beekeepers can access a detailed overview of the hives' health and productivity. The affordable system monitors a hive's weight, indicating how much it gained or lost each hour, day, week, and month. It also provides temperature and humidity readings inside and outside the hive while measuring atmospheric pressure data to track the weather. Beekeepers can see the number of bees in a colony and whether a queen is present. An alert system informs the owner if the hive was stolen or if animals damaged it. In addition, it uses the bee noise frequency to calculate and provide swarm predictions.
This image shows an example of real-time data from the HiveMinder system. (Image Credit: NewHopeApiary)
Beekeepers and farmers can purchase various hive monitoring systems featuring weight, temperature, humidity, bee counter, theft sensors, etc. However, these devices use Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) or WiFi for data transmission. Particularly, BLE has a short range when placed in a hive, which means a beekeeper must physically visit their beehive to obtain that data. Otherwise, the hive needs to be near a WiFi access point. To overcome those challenges, NewHopeApiary from BeeSource built HiveMinder, a system with off-the-shelf sensors, open-source software, and LoRa/LoRaWAN to provide real-time data collection and a higher wireless range. All the sensors are wired to the transmitter, making it slightly less convenient than BLE or WiFi based systems.
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Pollenity introduced Adopt-a-hive, a neat project for regular folk and bee lovers who want to help save the bees! Anyone interested in adopting a hive will become an owner of 60,000 bees, support the beekeeper caring for the bees, have three jars of honey per month shipped to their doorstep, and interact with beekeepers on a video call. Pollenity also uses Beebot, which features temperature, humidity, and sound sensors to generate a health report of the hive's bee colony.
One of IoBee's partners developed a beehive-monitoring system allowing beekeepers to interact with bees with minimal disruption. Sensors attached to the hive provide real-time tracking capabilities. Plus, users can log in to see what their bees are doing. The system alerts users if the colony loses a queen, if the hive has ventilation in winter, if there's natural availability around the hive, and when the queen mates and lays eggs. The bee counter determines how easy it is for bees to collect their honey from different areas.
It also monitors traffic through two light beams, which break once a bee enters the tunnel. The bees' traveling direction is based on the order in which the beam breaks. This can determine how many bees exit the hive. The gateway periodically interrogates the counter to see how many bees it counted. It then transmits that data to a smartphone before sending it to the cloud. Placing the hive atop a hive-scale balance provides weight measurements that correlate to bee traffic. The bee counter also determines the bees' productivity along with natural availability or efficiency.
The LongHive system can detect health problems in a beehive's colony. (Image Credit: Nathan Pirhalla)
Antonio Scala, Evan Diewald, and Nathan Pirhalla developed LongHive, an end-to-end beehive monitoring system enabled by the Helium Network and deep learning. Hobbyists and farmers alike can use this sensor-based technology to detect and monitor potential problems with colonial health. LongHive can be installed underneath a beehive, and with its various sensors, a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) can identify the hive's acoustic signatures. It also comes with a web-based dashboard, allowing owners to view the transient signals.
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