Beemon: An IoT-based beehive monitoring system

Abstract

Beekeepers have experienced significant losses to the population of their hives in recent years due to a phenomenon that was once referred to as the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). In the past couple of decades, there have been some efforts to determine the causes of this disaster and how they can be addressed. Some of the research has relied on the data that the beekeepers collect manually from their hives. Some of the more recent efforts have analyzed audio and video recordings obtained at the hives to better understand the behavior of bees and determine health status of the hives. Such research requires quality audio, video, and other sensor data captured using a reliable system. To make this practical, the system should be inexpensive and with minimal disruption to the bees’ natural behavior at their hives. Moreover, such a system should be capable of providing insights and warnings to facilitate early intervention and help mitigate the dire consequences. This paper provides details on the design and implementation of a data collection and monitoring system that was created in our research lab and is referred to here as Beemon. This system automatically captures sensor data (temperature, humidity, weight) and sends them using MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to a ThingsBoard dashboard. The system also sends captured video and audio recordings at the hives’ entrance to our remote server for analysis and further research. Beemon operates continuously in an outdoor apiary environment and allows a near real-time data collection. This paper present limited results of several years of real-world operations to demonstrate the purpose of the proposed Beemon system.