Non-intrusive Remote Apiculture Monitoring System

This paper presents the design and implementation of a remote bee hiving technology for providing beekeepers a remote facility to gather information related to bees inside the hive. Bees help at least 30% of the world’s crops and 90% of the world wild plants to thrive via cross pollination. Studies show that beekeepers lose significant percentages of the bee colonies during certain environmental conditions. Causes for this decline are overall hive health. The healthier the hive the more likely it is to survive. At present the most difficult problem is to understand the internal situation of the beehive with least disturbance to the bee colony. The production of honey depends on many factors, some of which are environmental factors such as temperature and relative humidity. Apiculture monitoring is the process of systematically observing and managing bee colonies, typically within the context of beekeeping or apiculture. Monitoring is crucial for the health and productivity of bee colonies, as it allows beekeepers to assess the condition of the hive, identify potential issues, and take appropriate actions to ensure the well-being of the bees. In the system proposed here, it has the process of collecting parameters like temperature, humidity and weight of a beehive and sending that data to the bee hive farmer. The prototypes are developed with Arduino Uno and ARM Microcontroller platforms. With this non-intrusive and low-cost system, farmers can monitor their beehive’s characteristics non-intrusively from long distance using a mobile phone. The system has been implemented with prototype designs. The first protype of this remote monitoring system for beehive is developed using Arduino Uno Board and the Arduino IDE software tool. The second advanced prototype is developed with ARM Cortex M4 based hardware and Keil uVision software tool. In addition, CubeMX is used as a code generator tool. The DHT11 sensor is used for collecting physical parameters such as temperature and humidity condition of the bee hive, and load cell HX711 weight sensor for the purpose of weighing the weight of honey hive. GSM module is used to transfer the data to the beehive farmer through message.