The measuring system for bee hives environmental monitoring

Abstract

The research on living organisms require high standards for non-invasiveness of the measurement setups both in operation principle as well as in the utilized materials. Adding an energy to the measured object may lead to disturbance of body functions and measurement interference. Also wrongly selected materials for construction of measurement setup may impact on organisms response. The specific of the beekeepers work is monitoring of bees family growth in conjunction with the season. Beekeeper makes decisions which are a result of expected results of breeding, state of bee family and a season. Intensity of conducted measurements is labour-intensive for the worker and overloading for the bees. In order to minimize the frequency of hive inspections a measurement setup for environmental parameters of a bee hive was developed in Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements PIAP. It was anticipated, that, basing on proper measurements, the state of bee family may be determined without the need of hive opening. The main task was development of measurement setup in a way which will not interfere with bees normal life and even be invisible to them. Also an attempt was made to develop a tools for tests for possible (presented in literature [4]) reduction of parasite varroa destructor. This reduction presumably may be obtained by the optimization of a size of honeycomb cell. With the utilization of possibilities of 3D printing workshop, a method for creating stencils for wax foundation was developed. This method allows to create wax foundations with the varied size of honeycomb cell, which may also change monotonically in a single wax foundation.