Automatic Environmental Monitoring of Honeybee Hive

Abstract

Environmental regulation of the inside nest is an important trait of social insects such as honeybee. Temperature and humidity inside the nest often indicate the colony health. A design for an environmental monitoring system was prepared to log temperature inside the hive space for three dimensional analyses. For logging multiple data for a period of time, sensor networking, electronic power provision and data storage were the main problem. For these, we developed a novel design and tested in the honeybee hive. The results showed that temperature was more stable inside the brood area and variable in the peripheral area of brood, and upper or lower side of the bee hive. This system could run for 3 weeks with reliability but not afterward. Further improvement of this system includes the increase of the sensor network with diverse environmental variables such as including humidity or sound, and the prolongation of the monitoring system even with the aid of the external power sources. Then this system would help in determining the colony health and even the attack from the larger animals such as hornets.