How serious are we about our bees? We keep stats!
Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth would be happy and proud that after 150 years of stagnation, beekeeping is going through a revolution. Advances in technology are making precision agriculture an important element of all animal husbandry and beekeeping should be no different. We are gathering data from our hives 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This data that we are collecting will enable us to better understand our honeybees and improve the health and production of our bees.
Each hive has multiple sensors placed inside and under the hive. The internal sensors collect temperature readings above and below the brood nest. New baby bees need a temperature between 92 and 100 degrees in order to develop properly Another internal sensor collects the relative humidity which is important during the honey curing process. To keep honey from fermenting it must be dried to remove the water content down to 18%. The final hive sensor sits under the hive and it collects the outside temperature, outside humidity and most importantly weight.
The weight tells us how healthy the hive is. The heavier the hive that tells us how large the bee population is and we can determine roughly how much honey has been collected. Once the sensors have collected the data it is uploaded to a central reporting repository via a solar powered wifi gateway that is located in the bee yard.