Research library

A Smart Sensor-Based Measurement System for Advanced Bee Hive Monitoring

The widespread decline of honey bee (*Apis mellifera* L.) colonies registered in recent years has raised great attention to the need of gathering deeper knowledge about this phenomenon, by observing the colonies' activity to identify possible causes, and design corresponding countermeasures. Smart sensor systems are being developed for real-time and long-term measurement of relevant parameters related to beehive conditions, such as the hive weight, sounds emitted by the bees, temperature, humidity, and CO₂ inside the beehive, as well as weather conditions outside. This paper presents a multisensor platform designed to measure the aforementioned parameters from beehives deployed in the field, and shows how the fusion of different sensor measurements may provide insights on the status of the colony, its interaction with the surrounding environment, and the influence of climatic conditions. The platform is capable of detecting colony-level events such as swarming, beehive theft, honey gathering, reserve food lack, and decrease in bee numbers due to illness, with a field deployment carried out on the Università Politecnica delle Marche campus.

Publication details

Organizations
🇮🇹 Università Politecnica delle Marche
Year
2020
Type
Journal

Relevancy to Gratheon

This paper presents a comprehensive multi-sensor hardware stack — weight, sound, temperature, humidity, and CO₂ — that closely mirrors the sensor set Gratheon integrates or plans to integrate in its hive monitoring products. The key finding that sensor fusion provides richer colony-state insight than any single sensor validates Gratheon's multi-modal approach. The specific event taxonomy (swarming, theft, honey gathering, food shortage, illness) maps directly to the actionable alert categories Gratheon surfaces in its web-app dashboard. The campus field-deployment methodology and the 2020 publication date also provide a mature, peer-reviewed baseline that Gratheon can cite when justifying its own sensor choices to potential enterprise or research customers.