Precision Apiculture – IoT System for remote monitoring of honeybee colonies

Abstract

Beekeeping practice, being very environmentally dependent, requires the temperature and the humidity in the hive to be in some regular ranges for optimal beehive health and productivity. Since most of the plants and flowers required for beehive prosperity and honey production are usually outside inhabited areas, the beekeeper must travel to the bee colonies to check them, which can be time and resource consuming. In this paper, an end to end remote monitoring and control system for a bee colony is presented. The system is consisted of a web-based system for monitoring and control of the conditions of the hives and IoT system for collecting the sensor measurements and transferring the data. The IoT system is composed of hardware units that are mounted on the beehives, containing temperature, humidity, weight sensors, actuators, and a microcontroller responsible for collecting the measurements and sending the data to the web system. The communication between the hardware unit and the web system uses WiFi or LoraWAN technology, that enables running the device on batteries. The system enables remote monitoring of multiple beehives and can be configured to alert the user via email or push notification if some sensor value is outside of predefined range. The system also enables sending commands to the unit controlling the actuators that can intervene on the beehive closing or opening a ventilation lid.