SAMS-International Partnership on Innovation in Smart Apiculture Management Services

Abstract

Future development in beekeeping has proved to be successful by implementing smart apiary management services that use information communication and technology (ICT) based on remote sensing tools for monitoring honybee colony health and productivity. The aim of Smart Apiculture Management Services (SAMS) is therefore, to develop an open source ICT technology that allows active monitoring and managing of bee colonies to ensures bee health and bee productivity. It also answers the requirements of beekeeping in different countries and settings, for sustainable agriculture worldwide. SAMS reduces the risks of depleting honey production that threatens livelihoods of beekeepers and degradation of pollination power of suffering bee colonies that threats overall agricultural production. It also simplify bee management while creating the possibility to understand the behaviour of bees and the environmental aspect better to ensure food production and bee farming activities. The outcome of SAMS are: a) A physical low-cost beehive model and integrated open source sensor and information transition technology, as well as energy-supply solution; b) A decision support system that combines the sensor-based data-outputs with other information sources and predictive models to measure, analyse and describe different states of the bee colony such as health, vitality and production; c) An automatic advisory support tool, which will alert the beekeeper in an easily understandable way if any aberrations from normal states are metered and will provide advice on appropriate countermeasures and d) A bee management business concept for the local production and up-scaled implementation of the developed beehives with integrated beehive monitoring system. These outcomes create jobs (particularly youths/ women), trigger investments and knowledge exchange networks.