Development of a Low-Cost Wireless Bee-Hive Temperature and Sound Monitoring System

Abstract

Precision beekeeping requires data acquisition, data analysis, and applications where the initial phase-data acquired plays a key role. This method of apiculture could be used to measure different bee colony parameters in real time, leveraging on wireless sensing technologies, which aid monitoring of a bee colony, while preventing infectious diseases like colony collapse disordera major loss in the management of honey bee population. In this paper, a lowcost wireless technology-based system, which measures in real-time, the temperature in and around the beehive and the sound intensity inside the hive is presented. This monitoring system is developed using an Arduino microprocessor, an ESP8266 communication module, and a Web-based server. The system provides valuable information concerning the bee colony behavior in terms of temperature and sound characteristics harvested from the server. Based on the measured temperature and sound information, colony beekeepers could easily detect events like increased food usage by the bees, breeding start time, pre-swarming action, actual swarming pattern, and the bee colony's death.

Bee Sound Detector: An Easy-to-Install, Low-Power, Low-Cost Beehive Conditions Monitoring System

“…However, despite research on these methods, sound processing seems to dominate in the detection of many harmful events in apiaries, such as swarming, external attacks, or even CCD (Table 1, C1, C3, C6 cases). As a result, researchers trying to detect these events have focused on creating IoT devices that collect sound data [17][18][19].…”

The Importance of Context Awareness in Acoustics-Based Automated Beehive Monitoring

“…To this end, the acoustic monitoring of beehives has emerged and is gaining popularity. In a recent literature review of beehive acoustics monitoring [24], several systems were reported showcasing tools for (i) bee activity detection [4,[25][26][27], (ii) beehive strength monitoring [28], (iii) queen absence detection [3,5,[29][30][31], (iv) swarming detection [22,23,[32][33][34], (v) pathogen or parasite infestation detection [35], (vi) detection of environmental pollutants and chemicals [36][37][38][39], and (vii) measuring of honeybee reaction to smoke [40], as well as overall beehive monitoring (e.g., identifying normal and abnormal hive, swarming duration, bee activity time) [41,42]. From a geographical perspective, most contributions have come from the USA, UK, Japan, Slovenia, and Italy.…”