Smart Hive

Apiculture is on the edge of implementing the newest technologies provided by the fourth industrial revolution referred to as the “Internet of Things.” new directive for the mason green fund has been to streamline the process of beekeeping with the assistance of sensors, databases, and smart frames. This proposal can provide a new approach at George Mason University for monitoring the overall health of the hive.

My name is Nicholas Paschke and I am the lead project manager of a patriot green fund supported project referred to as “Smart Hive.” Our goal is to make beekeepers’ lives easier through the use of microcontrollers and modern website design.

Imagine this: you are a beekeeper who is tasked with taking care of 5 different apiaries across Virginia and you need to ensure that not only are these beehives alive, but are healthy and growing at the rate in which they need to be. However, there’s an even deeper issue here, which is the fact that most of these hives cannot be visually inspected during the winter season or any temperature below 55 degrees fahrenheit or the beehives will suffer from hypothermia.

So, how would you inspect hives without looking at them? With sensors of course! Our group has designed not only a board which is scalable, affordable, and documented, but has the capability of measuring CO2, temperature, and humidity for weeks at a time. Beehives used in apiculture use a matrix of frames within a wooden box similar to this in order to have a well maintained system.

We decided to replace one of the frames within each hive with a sensor filled frame in order to monitor their health. These frames are surrounded by a mesh which separates the bees from the electronics and minimizes the interference between them. Each hive was designed with multiple humidity and temperature sensors in order to maximize our redundancy in the instance where one of them would go down or would need to be replaced.

Further into this, there is no soldering required in order to replace a sensor as header pins were used in the final board design to be able to quickly replace a sensor.

Measuring live data is great for beekeepers on the run, but truly being able to analyze long term recorded data is another story entirely. To suit this need and ease of use, we’ve implemented a website which the customer will be able to use from anywhere and download the data into a spreadsheet. The website was built with the mindset of having an unlimited number of frames, sensors, and hives and the ability to track all of them at the same time. The site is updated once every 10 minutes with the latest recording from each frame.

Our database schema was built with the attitude of having another group come in and add further sensors, further devices. This was accomplished by giving the university an accompanying user manual and technical user manual which discusses key points on how to scale this project further. This technology could possibly create an internet of things for our hives and possibly monitor other aspects of the environment at mason; all at the fingertips of those who truly care about our planet.

I’d like to thank the patriot green fund and the OSCAR program for helping us in our efforts of saving the bees.