A Pi-Based Beehive IoT System Design

Abstract

Applying Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies in various agriculture challenges and ecosystem challenges not only can reduce the man efforts but also improve the productivity and the efficiency. Among many agriculture or ecosystem challenges, monitoring bees is one of the most interesting and imperative ones, as bees play a critical role in both the ecosystem and the agriculture and their habitats are under very serious pressures. Even though there are several commercial beehive monitoring systems on the market, localization and customization of such systems is inevitable, due to various environments, climates, box designs, or various bee-keeping practices. In this article, we introduce the challenges here in Taiwan and the design to cope these challenges. Based on some low-cost components (like raspberry pi, various sensors, and communication facilities) on the market, we design our bee monitoring system which can monitor various environment data (like temperature, humidity, and GPS) and bee data (like bee sound and infra-red images). The prototype has been tested in the field, and we are evaluating its effectiveness.