Development of Artificial Stingless Bee Hive Monitoring using IoT System on Developing Colony

Abstract

The trend of stingless bees’ farm in Malaysia has increased recently as it has been proven that its honey gives various benefits to human beings. This trend requires beekeepers to do more frequent inspections of beehives. However, the current practice of opening the cover to inspect the colony and honey will disrupt colony activity. According to a recent study, these stingless bees can only survive between 22 and 38 degrees Celsius, and harsh weather conditions might lead to the collapse of bee colonies. In order to ensure a consistent honey production, the IoT monitoring system will be implemented on an artificial stingless beehive. The system is equipped with an embedded system that utilizes a NodeMCU ESP8266, temperature and humidity sensors, and load cell sensors. Next, honey compartment weight, temperature and humidity inside stingless beehive, and temperature and humidity outside stingless beehive will be uploaded to the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, namely Thingspeak and Cayenne. The data is sent to Thingspeak via the REST API while to Cayenne by the MQTT API. All data from the artificial stingless bee hive indicating the occurrence of colony rising and has been uploaded to the IoT platform. By analysing the data that were recorded for 13 days, all of the input data such as the weight of the honey compartment, the temperature in the hive, and the humidity in the hive, display its respective characteristics. For the honey compart weight, it has been found that the stingless bee colony is rising as a result of the increasing honey and colony in the compartment weight. Regarding the hive temperature, it has been determined that the temperature inside the hive is stable around 26°C to 38°C in normal weather conditions. Whereas for humidity inside the hive, it is remained between 76.5% and 85.6% due to the moisture from the honey inside the compartment. Lastly, these results indicate that the colony living in the artificial hive of stingless bees is healthy and growing.