Monitoring System for Remote Bee Colony State Detection

Abstract

. Honeybees are the main pollinators for agricultural and horticultural plants. They help at least 30% of the worlds crops and 90% of the worlds wild plants to thrive via cross-pollination. To minimise the effect of on-site colony inspections application of Precision Beekeeping solutions are becoming increasingly frequent. Real time, remote monitoring of the colonies using ICT can help the beekeepers to detect abnormalities and identify states of the colony. For successful implementation of the Precision Beekeeping system development of the bee colony monitoring hardware solution and computer software for data collection and further analysis is needed. This paper describes authors developed bee colony monitoring system for the remote bee colony state detection. Bee colony weight together with temperature are the key metrics for state and behaviour analysis. Hardware of the developed monitoring system is based on the popular ESP8266 low-cost Wi-Fi microchip. Weight is measured using single point load cell with possibility to measure weight up to 200kg, which is enough for the bee colony measurements. Data transfer from the remote apiary is provided by the external 3G router. For data storage and analysis cloud-based data warehouse was developed. Collected data is accessible in the web system in real time. In addition, web tool for system power consumption and battery life evaluation was developed to assess monitoring system sustainability. Described monitoring system is developed within the Horizon 2020 project SAMS, which is funded by the European Union within the H2020-ICT-39-2016-2017