Embedded wireless stingless beehive monitoring and data management system

Abstract

In this paper, an embedded wireless stingless bee monitoring system, which investigates the environment's temperature and humidity effect on the bee activity and honey production of Heterotrigona Itama, a stingless bee species, is presented. The variables observed by the system are the weight of the honey container, the temperature inside the hive, humidity inside the hive, temperature of the environment outside of the hive, the humidity of the environment outside of the hive, and bee activity counter. The sensors used are Strain Gauge Load Cell (SGLC) sensor for weighing purposes, DHT22 sensors for temperature and humidity, and infrared transceivers bee counter sensor for bee activity monitoring. All installed sensors were controlled by using a NodeMCU microcontroller. All data were recorded and transferred to a Google Firebase real-Time database. The proposed system offers an android application to access the recorded data called EMAS apps. EMAS fetches all the information from the database and represents it on graphs and pages in the user smart devices. This paper analyses the data obtained for 36 hours from a single hive. Results obtained represent a relationship between the temperature collected and bee activity with the honey produced. It was observed that in the morning, the increase of temperature leads to high traffic of bees going out of the hive, which decreases the weight of the hive to 2.7 Kg. Meanwhile, in the evening, the decrease in temperature leads to high traffic of bees going into the hive, which increases the hive weight to 4.5 Kg. For future work, to enhance the system's performance, installation of the embedded system into an array of hives was advised and longterm data observation process was required.