EBVC: Electronic Bee Veterinarian – Beyond Monitoring and Onto Control

Given a fleet of beehives, how can we help with thermoregulation, for healthier bees and increased honey production? The objective is to develop a complete thermal control system, comprising hardware and software, that monitors and analyzes internal hive temperature in real-time and autonomously activates the heater or cooler as needed. We propose such a framework, ‘EBVC ’ (Electronic Bee Veterinarian), which is: (a) White-Box: entirely based on first principles, physics equations, and control theory; (b) End-to-End: does sensing, analysis, optimization, and control; (c) Practical: beekeepers can ‘set it and forget it’, as the underlying methods are all scalable and linear on the input size, have no parameters or hyperparameters to tune, and require no customization for specific hive type, geographical location, etc.. With reasonable assumptions that we list below, we estimate that EBVC will yield up to $71 benefits per hive per year, thanks to increased honey production.