Development of a beehive monitoring system

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Honeyview Farm, one of the leading honey producers in BC, is interested in researching and developing a solution to allow cheaper and faster hive assessment to keep hive losses to a minimum and to allow further research into why hive losses are occurring. Currently, they have to assess each hive manually by opening it up and examining the bees and frames. This is a slow and subjective process and has been reported to disturb the natural activity of the hive for around 24 hours. There is considerable interest in the development of sensor arrays to improve beehive management and research programs. Studies have shown that acoustics, temperature, humidity and other factors can be measured and correlated to hive status and behavior. To improve the hive assessment process, a sensor array can be developed to continuously assess hives with less labour and only alerting a beekeeper to examine the hive when abnormal behavior is detected. The data from this sensor array can be analyzed and be used to find correlations between hive characteristics, hive health and behaviour. Honeyview Farm plans to collaborate with Dr. Golnaraghi, director of the School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Golnaraghi has been working on applications of direct relevance, utilizing various sensor technologies, over the past twenty years. In this respect, the long-term goal of this research is to develop a low-cost sensor array that can be non-invasively installed into a beehive to monitor relevant characteristics of the hive such as temperature, acoustics, humidity and weight. The proposed work entails electronic and sensory hardware selection, sensor array prototype development, field testing of sensor array prototype, and data analysis and study.