# bee hive monitoring



## mushmushi (Sep 23, 2011)

Hello fellow beeks,

I want to be able to monitor my beehives for temperature, humidity, weight and maybe even gases in the hope to 
gain a better understand of what is happening as well as detect diseases. Swarming detection (and prevention) would be amazing too.

I assume that a diseased hive might have some problems thermoregulating their hive.

Would it be a waste a my time doing this ? 

Anybody out there monitoring their hives? 

I saw a few products available but they look a bit expensive.

Cheers,

MM


----------



## Ben Brewcat (Oct 27, 2004)

While that data would be fascinating to collect, I don't think there's much of a body of baseline data to which to compare it. So if you observed CO2 levels climbing, what would you do with that information? It could be that the temperature is lower, so is it that the bees are fanning less or is the colony about to die? If the data is only from a couple colonies, how would one reliably correlate a data spike with colony mortality/morbidity?

Now weight is certainly a helpful data point to track: see the NASA hive-scale project for more info on that. You can track nectar flows, brood build and loss, swarm departure, and all kinds of things. 

Not to dissuade you, detailed data is a good thing! But especially if you are a newer beek, I might offer for consideration that the learning that would be garnered might yield more of a return (for time, effort and expense) by simply getting additional colonies, or exploring different management styles.


----------



## Riskybizz (Mar 12, 2010)

Mush

Get yourself a few good books like the new one from Michael Bush. Why spend all day in the lab? The fun and fascinating part of beekeeping is getting out there and diving into a few hives. Hands on is great, you'll really enjoy it.


----------



## mgolden (Oct 26, 2011)

Found a $6 thermometer c/w humidity meter at Home Depot that I have laying flat on the top side of my inner cover. Have a 2 1/2 inch high "feeder super" that I place above the inner cover so there is height for sugar blocks and thermometer. Have window screen on top so when I open the telescopic cover, I don't get bees flying out. 3/4 inch vent hole at front. To entrance is on under side and at front of inner cover.

It's interesting but I'm not doing any recording. Temp runs 30F to 50F and humidity is 65% to 85%. 

With bees below inner cover, I have peeked in when its been -25F.


----------



## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

If you're so inclined, I see the sensing side of this interesting. I think you should leave the environmental control side to the bees, of course with the exception of some good basic beekeeping skills. Measurement of temperature, humidity, weight, and acceleration would be interesting. The first three for obvious reasons, but acceleration might be helpful as a swarm indicator or other behavioral indicators. Look forward to seeing your data.


----------



## Island Apiaries (Aug 9, 2010)

There is a website called www.beehacker.com that is promoting the development of items like you are looking for. they are open source, so if you have a bit of tech know how, you can build them yourself. They are based on the arduino unit.


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

I have an arduino and some related experience. Here are a bunch of different, related ideas- please let me know if you want to work together...

Last week I saw this great talk:
http://www.youtube.com/v/QPgqfnKG_T4#!&autoplay=1&fs=1
(basically he connects a webcam to his arduino, uses some open source image processing, watches his birdfeeder for squirrels, and then shoots them with a servo-controlled water gun- all of it is automated; he originally used it to count birds of different species for the bird count day).

All I could think of is how this same idea could be used to monitor hives. For example, it should be easy to get the counts of workers, drones, queens on the front of the bottom board at every time interval throughout the day/night. 

There's a lot of potential there. With some fiddling, you could probably do a good job at automating the identification of dances as well, but probably not individual bees without some more expensive gear.

Anyway, it's a really powerful way to automate data collection, the hardware is relatively cheap (<$100), although it has high technical requirements. If anybody is seriously interested, let me know and we can talk about doing some development (do you know any python?)

Here are some related products:
http://beealert.blackfoot.net/~beealert/hivemont/counter.php

Some other projects not involving arduino (but involving image processing, say openCV), include taking photos of your frames or sticky board after mite count and writing some code to do basic counts of mites or frame cells (total cells, # open brood & type, # capped brood & type, # pollen, #honey, # empty, etc).

One of the things I do at my job is write software for monitoring processes (like manufacturing facilities or airline traffic delays or social media or ...) for unusual events. Combine that methodology with bees and you could have some cool applications.

Example: we could make a little device (<$100), which measures internal/external hive temperature, watches ingress/egress, and even monitors sound inside the hive and then makes an alert whenever unusual events occur.

Unusual events can be known, such as "swarm sound", "swarm happened", "temp drop inside hive" or other (something's not right, but none of the above)... It would be nice to monitor some hives with say, wax moths, or bad SHB to see if you get get profiles for how bees behavior changes in those three variables and their correlations.

Basically, you have to have some examples of what healthy hives do at different times of the year and unhealthy hives do, and then it all works out. So it would probably take a month to get the temperature part going, a month for the sound, 2-3 months to get the image processing going, and then a month or two to look at the 3 together, and then maybe a year in prototypes to get the kinks worked out of the algorithms (eg what's normal for swarm season, what's normal for a nectar flow, what's normal for winter, how to deal with sensors which get messed up by the bees/weather, etc).

The only things I don't have right now are one more temp probe, a microphone that picks up the right frequency, and the cam. I also have to make sure my current arduino has enough rom to support everything I want to do- I may have to upgrade to a "mega" or it's an excuse to play with a beagle board. I imagine we could wire up a frame to have a temp probe and mic, and have an external little box for the microprocessor on the front of the bottom deep- wired to the frame and also have the cam on the little box pointing down at the entrance. You could put a little red LED on top that comes on when things aren't right too. They are completely configurable. You can use ethernet and have a webserver on them, but my current approach was
to write everything to an SD card as a csv file, and then just copy that to my computer for analysis. 

I sent the beehacker website admin an email... We'll see what happens. I have a 2 year old and work full time, so I can't devote much time right now (have more free time in fall/winter), but I'd love to be part of a team hacking on this stuff.


----------



## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

I currently have an arduino getting the weight of a hive along with a temperature and relative humidity probe that's sitting inside the notch of the inner cover. It's been collecting all winter. The scale is more temperature sensitive than I'd like and I have yet to figure out precisely how to compensate for it, but it does show trends. I also have a weather station getting wind speed and direction along with precip. amounts at the hive. I've got a battery on the whole rig that's charged by a solar panel at the hives so it's essentially no maintenance. This is all in my yard, and it transmits the data to a little laptop inside via an RF unit also on the arduino. I agree I could've spent the time and money on more bee stuff, but geeked-out electronics are also a hobby, so it sort of went hand in hand.

Here's some quick and dirty graphing I've automated. http://www.libhart.com/hives/hivetemp.html
It's a 6hr, 24hr, and 72hr view (if I remember correctly). The probe inside the hive isn't quite as good as the one outside and is a bit noisier as you can see by the data. Also, the dew point isn't really given by a sensor. The temp probe inside the hive has a relative humidity sensor built in, so I can use that data to give a decent estimate of the outdoor dewpoint. My idea there was that I had insulated a box over the inner cover for the winter and I wanted to know if the warm air was above the dew point and holding the moisture as vapor or if it was too cold and the moisture was condensing out.

BlairC....arduinos are great, I have two others currently in "production"  at the house doing various things. But have you seen the Raspberry Pi? Can't wait get one and poke at it.


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

@libhart Very nice. Now I have to ask all the geeky questions about how you setup your web server, if you have any shields, how you update the data, if you use 802.11 or 802.15 or something else, etc.. I have visited the raspberry pi site several times recently. It seems like every time I find something, an ever cooler alternative comes along (arduino -> beagle board -> raspberry pi).

Any idea if gnuplot is producing those line plots on your web page?

What do you do for weight? Did you hack an old digital bathroom scale? I'm curious to hear more about how temperature, humidity, etc affect the scale. 

I'll probably be asking you some questions as it all goes along. My first task is to get all the hardware together (scale, humidity, check on temp/humidity probes, mic, ??)


----------



## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Sure  I'll PM you with the details, no use boring everyone here.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

libhart said:


> Sure  I'll PM you with the details, no use boring everyone here.


Keep it in the thread, there are more techies here.

My setup was put together over the winter, but, not deployed yet. The original plan was to deploy for march 1st, but, my mother had a stroke, so we did the 'drop everything and go home for 5 weeks' trick in late february. I'm hoping to get deployed over the next week or two.

I've bought a scale with an rs-232 connection, and a temp probe that plugs into a usb connector. My real work is embedded process control systems, so, I have no shortage of low power little boards to run it all out at the hive. Current plan is to use a mips based board, that has usb and wifi on board, running a custom built openwrt linux system. It'll be taking temperature and weight measurements on a regular basis, then dumping them into a database located in the house, using the wifi link. The real stickler for it all is power, but, in the short term I'll solve that by simply running an extension cord out to a hive beside the house. Not sure if that'll become the long term solution, or if I'll do something different in the long term.

I was working a little 'gung ho' on the software for it all back in early february, but, got yanked away. Now that I'm back, I'm a little behind on 'real work' so, there hasn't been time to fuss with this stuff since I got back. It'll be a fun project once it's going, and, later in the summer I'll be looking at ways and means of doing it a little more cost effectively for more hives.


----------



## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Ok fellow techies....  cut and paste of the PM.

The webserver is hosted (currently at 1and1 but I'm looking to ditch them).
The laptop/server inside runs ubuntu and postgresql.
I used to have a wishield and tried to use 802.11 but hated it. The code to support the shield was big and wicked buggy. I switched to JeeLabs radio unit. http://jeelabs.com/products/rfm12b-board. They actually have an arduino compliant board with this radio built in, but I just went for the add-on. The code is easy and small and is rock solid. It's using just a really basic protocol that's demostrated in the demo sketches from jeelabs. The big drawback is that you need an arduino, or they sell a self-contained dongle, for the inside laptop. With the wishield, the laptop already had wireless. It needs a separate device now, but it's solid so I'll take it.

Gnuplot is producing those graphs and it's doing it locally here on the laptop, then every so often I rsync the images up to 1and1 to get served off libhart.com. So a script dumps the data from postgresql and gnuplot plots it to png output and ships up the images.

For the weight I bought a "relatively" inexpensive shipping platform scale off ebay that had a separtely wired display. If you're interested the guy told me he'd sell me working platforms that had broken displays. The platform has 4 load sensors in it all wired in parallel so that you only have 4 wires from the platform as you would for 1 load cell. I then used an INA125P to amplify the voltage coming off the platform. It's basically linear so if you measure the voltage with no weight, then put known weights on it you can figure out a y=mx+b type equation to calculate the weight from the voltage the arduino is reading. It's reading the analog inputs and calculating the voltage from that.

The weather station I have is here: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8942
Got a really nice discount from last year's Free Day. The weather station is pretty basic. The wind speed is calculated by counting switch closures, the rain is calculated the same way. The wind direction is done by calculating the resistance going through the weather vane, which is done w/a voltage divider on the arduino side. To avoid the arduino's interrupts I used a (couple) PCF8583 which is a really nice little I2C counter chip. You can make it count based on a crystal, but you can also make it count based on an input. Then the arduino just reads the count off the chip via I2C. Since I was counting with hardware I had debounce with hardware too for the rain and the anemometer. I used an MC14490 for that.

So now you're asking where the heck I put all these chips and the supporting resistors and caps, etc. I used eagle and designed my own shield. The shield has all that hardware on it plus a header with all the inputs. It also has a separate header for the radio board. I had the board made up by batchpcb. It's really nice having a shield to do all that. Keeps the ugly wiring to a minimum.

The outdoor temp is monitored by the indoor laptop using another arduino that's performing a completely separate task (it's watching my boiler and tracking my oil usage). It's only about 150 ft from the weather station, and it's in a better spot to avoid spikes from the sun.

So runtime is that the arduino code low-power sleeps for its maximum 8 seconds, wakes up, takes a reading from the wind/scale/temp/RH, and goes back to sleep. Then every 5 minutes it does the same thing, but it also takes a reading from the rain, averages all the wind/scale/temp/RH readings for the 5 minutes and transmits it via the radio. Then starts the cycle all over. This keeps the power usage way down and I get readings every 5 minutes.

Power is a solar panel, a reasonably cheap charge controller, and 12V SLA battery. The arduino can take 12V if you're not using a ton of power. All the sensors combined use about 30mA. The arduino while sleeping uses about 9mA. The whole thing while transmitting goes up to about 90mA.

If you have any more questions let me know. It took my quite a while to get all of it going and the first shield I designed had a ground plane which turned out to be a lot of trouble so I had to order another one which sucked, but now it just trucks and I don't have to touch it.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

libhart said:


> The platform has 4 load sensors in it all wired in parallel so that you only have 4 wires from the platform as you would for 1 load cell. I then used an INA125P to amplify the voltage coming off the platform. It's basically linear so if you measure the voltage with no weight, then put known weights on it you can figure out a y=mx+b type equation to calculate the weight from the voltage the arduino is reading. It's reading the analog inputs and calculating the voltage from that.


And if you put a known weight on it, leave it sit for a bunch of days, recording the voltage and temperatures, you will find another fit, because output is also dependant on temperature. This is why most of these scales calibrate to zero when you turn them on, they are calibrating for temperature.

I had started building up a temp vs weight correlation on mine before I got called out of town, but didn't get a wide enough temp swing. I've got it running again now, and, hopefully will get a wide enough swing over the next few days, so that I can solve for temperature correction factors, another linear fit.

I have a temperature probe with mine, not to measure temps of the hive, but, to get ambient temp for correcting the scale data. time will tell how it all works once I've re-organized a few things to get it under one of the hives.


----------



## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

True, that's a good way to do it. I could theoretically correct my past data once I find the fit since I do have the temperature data stored w/the weight. As I was putting all of this in place I don't think I was getting very good swings either as well. I also wasn't sure the platform would even survive, it's not really meant to be outside, but the only thing in the base is the load cells, so I figured what the heck. Getting that temp correlation might be a good mid-summer project so my data is a lot less noisy.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

One way I'm going to cross check it, is fairly strait forward. Once in a while we will lift the hive off the platform, and see how much off of zero it reads, then reset the scale. Over the summer, I'll have a few points with those corrections, and, like you say, should be able to solve the temp correction factors from that.

Our main goal from putting a scale under the hive is two-fold. First, as newbies, we really dont understand the flows, so, we have a birthday calendar up on the wall, and, are starting to mark the dates various plants bloom. At the end of the summer, we should be able to cross reference that with hive weight data, and, get a much better idea of what plants are generating flow into the hive(s).

There are a few different wifi bathroom scales coming to market these days. One project I would like to tackle, when I have the time, hack some new firmware into one of them, so it's no longer married to the vendor provided service(s), and allows me to set it up to log into my own database. Probably not the cheapest hardware for the task, but, if I can get firmware working with an off the shelf scale, it certainly becomes the easiest, particularily for more folks, who may not be quite so technically inclined. An example, the 'computer' I'm currently using for my data logging, is actually a re-purposed router, linksys WRT160NL which I have flashed with my own firmware, tailored to exactly this task. It runs the wifi in client mode rather than access point mode, connects to the network here in the house, and logs directly into a mysql database.


----------



## quevernick (Feb 22, 2011)

I've dabbled with running small pic and avr circuits here and there but I'm unfamiliar with the "shield" term am I missing something? I've always thought it would be neat although probably pointless to run a wire through the top of a frame and measure the deflection to get an individual weight for each frame.


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

quevernick said:


> I've dabbled with running small pic and avr circuits here and there but I'm unfamiliar with the "shield" term am I missing something? I've always thought it would be neat although probably pointless to run a wire through the top of a frame and measure the deflection to get an individual weight for each frame.


FYI: A shield is... probably better described by the arduino people
"Shields are boards that can be plugged on top of the Arduino PCB extending its capabilities. The different shields follow the same philosophy as the original toolkit: they are easy to mount, and cheap to produce."
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoShields

Usually they do one thing like wifi (802.11 or (xbee) 802.15 or ethernet or...)


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

On a slightly different tangent, I have started reading up on the openCV doc, and bought a used copy of the oreilly book.
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

It's a fancy open source image processing set of libraries. Current goals include (1) getting area count of comb in a frame (2) getting count of cells (3) getting counts of cell contents (empty, pollen, honey (capped/uncapped), worker/drone/uncapped brood, other). I have a camera on a tripod by my hive when I do inspections, (I actually saw my queen for the first time in a photo), so this should be a good starting point. I have some other things on the agenda as well (identifying bees by caste). 

I'm more on the algorithms side than the hardware side, but I get by with the hardware mainly by reading excessively and playing monkey-see monkey-do...

I'm getting a laundry list of geeky bee projects going...


----------



## quevernick (Feb 22, 2011)

Biggest problem with image processing for comb is your would need to brush or shake most of the bees off first. Otherwise I imagine it would throw off the counts. It might help to build a frame holder that keeps the camera at the same angle/distance for each shot.


----------



## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

I must be really off base. I have been collecting RTDs and 4-20ma adapters, load cells, and an AtoD board. I was saving for National Instrument's Labview, seeing as I have a few other applications that it would be helpful for.

Crazy Roland


----------



## libhart (Apr 22, 2010)

Roland....I'm way to cheap to buy LabView...plus it's just not as fun if I don't have to interpret a data sheet written by some engineer who hasn't seen daylight in 7 years 

A shield is a board with male pins out the bottom and female headers out the top that perfectly mate with the arduino...aka a fancy marketing term for a daughter board.


----------



## HONEYDEW (Mar 9, 2007)

A beek named Boris used to be on here, and he did alot of the stuff the orig. poster was asking about. here is his site http://www.beebehavior.com/index.php


----------



## cinch123 (Jan 16, 2012)

I am working up weight and temperature monitoring for my hives right now. I'm using two JeeNodes (google it) which are Arduino-compatible boards with wireless radios built in. One sits on the hive and the other is in the house. The one in the hive has a TMP421 temperature sensor, and a weight sensor from a $20 Target scale with an amplifier circuit. The JeeNode collects the data and sends it every 5 minutes to the one in the house. That one is attached to a bare bones Debian box via Serial. There's a Python script that reads the serial data and uploads it to Pachube.com for graphing. It's not currently operational but if you go over to Pachube you will see other feeds that are similar, not necessarily in beehives.


----------



## gjd (Jan 26, 2011)

If you're interested in simple temps and humidity, there's a much easier solution if DIY isn't one of your objectives:

http://www.lacrossetechnology.com/weatherdirect.php
Under $100 gets you humidity and 2 temps (sensor has a 2nd wire probe) transmitted 100-200' to internet connection, collected at whatever intervals you want (seconds to maybe 1/2 hour), collects on their web site for downloading in xls file and optional alarm reporting.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Roland said:


> I must be really off base. I have been collecting RTDs and 4-20ma adapters, load cells, and an AtoD board. I was saving for National Instrument's Labview, seeing as I have a few other applications that it would be helpful for.


This gets me curious. What metrics are you interested in tracking ?

I was inspired to kick off my setup after looking at hivetool.org, and went the route of 'off the shelf' for all of my kit, simply because I dont have the time to fuss with wiring stuff up. I'm far better off spending a couple of hours on 'billable time' then run the visa card for 'plug and play' gear, than trying to wire up and debug a homebrew system.

In our case, the having a hive tricked out with an automated scale system is to learn about nectar flows more than anything else, altho looking at the types of plots that can come from the data, I'm sure we can infer a lot more over time.


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

quevernick said:


> Biggest problem with image processing for comb is your would need to brush or shake most of the bees off first. Otherwise I imagine it would throw off the counts. It might help to build a frame holder that keeps the camera at the same angle/distance for each shot.


That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm in the "hard" part now of trying to get through some of the openCV doc... It shouldn't be too bad though. Step 1 is automating the finding of hexagons, your basic segmentation/edge detection task. I'll try and post an image next week if I have the time to work on it.


----------



## whiskers (Aug 28, 2011)

libhart- one vote for not bored here.
Bill


----------



## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

Grozzie2: Initially the load cell was for an old platform scale, to splice into the rod up the back.
I have several uses for temperature control, hence the RTD. I have other non-beekeeping(photonics) and wood working(hive construction) projects that could use stepper or servo control. I liked the Labview because it seemed to be able to connect alot of devices easily that other software could not. Correct me it I am wrong.

I work like a glacier. This project started with a Timex-Sinclair basis. 
Crazy Roland


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Roland said:


> I liked the Labview because it seemed to be able to connect alot of devices easily that other software could not. Correct me it I am wrong.


I've never used labview, so, cant comment on it in so much as how much it can connect to etc. I do know that in years gone past, it was difficult to get all the bits interfaced at times, no matter what the platform. Today, I've found _most_ things can be dealt with by doing a good search on ebay, and find a gadget that either does what you want, or hooks up to what you want, and plugs into the computer with a usb connector. I'm not fond of soldering stuff together, so, I tend to work with stuff I can find that's 'ready built' and easily hooked up.

On the software side, I tend to write all of my own stuff anyways, for me, that's the easy part once the bits are all hooked up.


----------



## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

labview! Oh baby this is a techie group. Do you guys really believe you can out do a research group from any University? Go to the basics. Design of the experiment, if you can't define what you hope to prove what are you going to do with labview? Anything less than 100 buck would be laughed at for research. You might as well use a thermometer from Walmart and record the reading on paper and pencil.


----------



## BeeCurious (Aug 7, 2007)

Acebird said:


> labview! Oh baby this is a techie group. Do you guys really believe you can out do a research group from any University? Go to the basics. Design of the experiment, if you can't define what you hope to prove what are you going to do with labview? Anything less than 100 buck would be laughed at for research. You might as well use a thermometer from Walmart and record the reading on paper and pencil.


Is anyone discouraged by the above posting?


----------



## quevernick (Feb 22, 2011)

I can't comment about the motives of everyone else on this thread but my interest in datalogging environmental conditions from a hive would purely be for informational purposes. That and I like playing with electronics especially when I can combine 2 of my hobbies  I fail to see how collecting general information like temperature, weight, and humidity wouldn't provide you with some useful data especially when accompanied by observations when doing hive inspections. The research world is generally a big joke anyways, after reading a lot of research papers I come away with the notion that they were paid to come up with findings one way or another. Besides there is nothing wrong with using a walmart thermometer and recording it all on paper, its just more labor intensive.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

BeeCurious said:


> Is anyone discouraged by the above posting?


It's not worth responding to.


----------



## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

quevernick said:


> I fail to see how collecting general information like temperature, weight, and humidity wouldn't provide you with some useful data especially when accompanied by observations when doing hive inspections. The research world is generally a big joke anyways,


Super, you are having fun. The research world is filled with eager minds trying to make a difference. In reality the researchers are not paid. The reality is the head honcho applies for a grant or funding and once he/she gets it he/she is indebted to the payee. In most cases the data is sound. How the numbers or the interpretations are presented has more to do with the head honcho.

The bottom line is if you are having fun than go for it but you can't expect to come up with any breakthroughs.


----------



## quevernick (Feb 22, 2011)

Breakthroughs are rarely expected anyways


----------



## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

Do you guys really believe you can out do a research group from any University?

Since WE get our hands dirty, why yes. With the recent results, or lack thereof, coming out of the Universities, it really is not that difficult for a working person to find a solution to today's problems. It seems the more educated a person gets, the less applicable their output is. There is one exception, at the U of Nebraska.

Grozzie2 - what language do you program in?

Crazy Roland


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

In response to the labview comment, I did some work at a field station where they used campbell scientific dataloggers
http://www.campbellsci.com/dataloggers

They are mechanical (so the shed with the loggers made these funny clicking noises whenever a unit of time passed) which has advantages/disadvantages....

Personally I have seen advantages/disadvantages to each approach. Off the shelf works, has support, etc, but custom implementations can usually support exactly the data collection device you want to use, are more customizable, and are usually a lot cheaper if you put in some elbow grease and time on ebay/craigslist/thrift stores.

In response to @Acebird, I have had that pessimistic view at times, but it doesn't get anything accomplished. I've found that the more you get involved, the more questions you ask, the more you come into contact with people who are also hacking at your level, the better you get, etc. I'm not looking to make a side business, but there are others who have. Personally, I would just like to use some monitoring to better understand and notice the things my bees are doing that I didn't notice before. If I'm lucky, it may give me better insights to signs of pests, swarming, nectar flow changes, etc that I didn't notice before. That's my $0.02.


----------



## Acebird (Mar 17, 2011)

BlairC said:


> Personally, I would just like to use some monitoring to better understand and notice the things my bees are doing that I didn't notice before. If I'm lucky, it may give me better insights to signs of pests, swarming, nectar flow changes, etc that I didn't notice before.


If you have no experience setting up experiments you have so many pitfalls. Equipment failures, (monitoring), collect the wrong data, or misinterpret the data if you are lucky enough to do it right. I am all for doing things just for fun but to draw any usable conclusions from small samplings is not likely to happen. Universities have the equipment and the know how to do things right. Unfortunately politics can get in the way of publishing the truth of what they find but not always.


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Roland said:


> Grozzie2 - what language do you program in?


Pretty much all of my work is in C and/or C++. All of it targets embedded systems, and we only use pc based systems for development and occaisionally for a quick and dirty prototype. Anything that is ultimately headed to a production environment, will normally deploy on some type of system on chip target, just for production cost reasons. 4 megs of flash, 16 megs or ram, all encapsulated with a mips processor that has a bunch of i/o built in, can typically end up landed on this side of the pond, fully assembled, tested etc, for on the order of 30 bucks a pop. Cant even buy the processors for x86 systems at that price point, never mind all the associated support hardware.

The hive project is a one-off, for my own use. If I was going to be deploying a thousand of them, I'd do a little research into what's available from various manufacturing sources, and home in on a far more cost effective method. For a one-off, it's usually much cheaper to just buy stuff one can plug together and get working over a weekend, than it is to fuss with custom build stuff. Maybe not so much if one isn't counting the time involved, but, I have to. My business doesn't leave me with a lot of spare time for fun projects, so, when I have one, I look for ways to fast track it.


----------



## BlairC (Mar 26, 2012)

grozzie2 said:


> Pretty much all of my work is in C and/or C++.


FYI: All I do is C at work, and mostly linear algebra at the core (eg LAPACK). I really like R (for statistics, it's free, lots of libraries), do some python/shell scripting/matlab that kind of thing when the situation calls. I've been looking at the embedded python on arduino, hoping I could hook that up with openCV like the guy with the squirrel shooting arduino. But the idea of taking an old ross round comb super and putting in an old x86 mobo with lightweight linux (I used mint last time and it seemed fine) is appealing for one off. I am totally new to the hardware side, but I'm getting pretty good with a multimeter.


----------



## BeeCurious (Aug 7, 2007)

Maybe you guys can work on perfecting the Apidictor.

Add sound monitoring to your list... 

http://www.beesource.com/build-it-yourself/apidictor/


----------



## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

Grozzzie2 - thanks for the reply. I don't know C, so that is an issue for me. 

Do you(anyone) think there would be enough demand for a load cell interface on a freight scale to warrant the development of a custom device? Barry is working on a scale, we have had a manual scale for decades, and NASA is looking for data from them. It would be nice if we could all provide NASA with data in the same format.

Crazy Roland


----------



## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Roland said:


> Do you(anyone) think there would be enough demand for a load cell interface on a freight scale to warrant the development of a custom device?


I have no idea how much demand there would be, and, I suspect that would change with cost. A cheap device that does the job would probably have a lot more demand than a rather spendy gadget. But just where is the tipping point, I have no clue.


----------



## villagefool (Apr 17, 2012)

Folks, you might want to check out hivetool.org. We have 3 hives online. Runs under linux - open source shell scripts, perl and some c code. The hardware link lists the scales and sensors we've tried. Check out GA003, it's been running the longest. Click on the "Daily at Midnight Graph" under Additional Links and see what three weeks in March in Athens, GA will do for a hive. You also might want to check out the "Hive Management" link to see some of the weight and temperature signatures we've recorded. These hives are registered with NASA's Honey Bee Net and provide data downloads in NASA format. Be glad to help anybody set one up.

--Paul


----------

