Development and testing of hive sensor hardware for audio, video, microclimate and environmental climate monitoring

Generally several parameters of individual colonies can be continuously and automatically measured and analyzed: temperature and humidity by digital sensors, hive acoustics using sound sensors and bee behavior via video observation. On the other hand costs of those measurements are very different thus limiting economically feasible solutions. Nowadays rapid improvements in temperature, sound measurement systems and information technologies overall allow economically feasible applications in Precision Apiculture. Continuous data capture and analysis can be used to monitor individual bee hives and the data can be adapted for individual bee colony maintenance.

Existing bee hive measuring hardware, based on audio, video and microclimate sensors of the project partners have to be adapted for the purpose of this project. Danish partner will be responsible for bee hive video observations. Using the video system bee activity at the hive entrance will be monitored as well as the bee nectar harvesting area will be observed. Turkish partner will develop his hive microclimate sensor board based on wireless communication into a multi sensor platform capable to integrate all the needed sensor hardware. German partner will adapt audio sensors for individual hive state monitoring purposes. Latvian partner will test temperature sensors for hive monitoring and develop guidelines for convenient hive temperature measurements. Each sensor system will be tested under experimental conditions on different hives. During the project identical hive constructions will be used by all partners for the experiments to guarantee the composability of the individual sensor systems. During this WP1 design of the sensors and their placement will be clarified.

 

Milestone: Design of the individual measurement sensor hardware is fixed; guidelines for sensor placement in the hive will be developed.