Jonathan and his graduate students at Grand Valley State University have been working with the Bee Informed Partnership to automate the monitoring of live honeybee colonies via electronic sensor platforms. In particular we are interested in automatically capturing the weight of colonies. Currently, there are two commercial scale offerings (BeeWatch and SolutionBee) that can be purchased and configured to forward weight, temperature, and humidity to BIP. Below you can monitor the status of two of our colonies in our home apiary that we have been monitoring since May 2014 and October 2014, respectively. You can read more about the project in this really excellent article published by Rapid Growth Media.
If you are a beekeeper and would like to become a “citizen scientist” and collect data in your apiary, visit the Bee Informed Partnership’s Hive Scale information page for more information on how to get started.
You can view our live hive data in the graph below. Feel free to interactive with the date / zoom settings and explore. The first hive below has a BeeWatch scale, with the data being sampled once per hour. The graph is updated every 24 hours (at around 2am eastern.). The second scale is being monitored with the SolutionBee scale, with data being sampled very 15 minutes. The graph is updated whenever we go out to the apiary with an iPhone and fetch/upload the data.
