Long-Term and Extensive Monitoring for Bee Colonies Based on Internet of Things

The pollination during bees' foraging is vital to continue species on the Earth. However, the losses of bee colonies are being more extensive problems in recent decades, which have seriously impacted the global environment but have not received enough attention from human beings yet. Based on widely investigating detectable features, this article presents an IoT-based system for long-term and extensive monitoring of bee colonies. Multiple features, including temperature and humidity inside the hive, bee combs' weight, bee colony's sounds, and a number of bees passing through the hive entrance, can be detected hourly by the proposed system. Furthermore, a four-month practical monitoring indicates that the system can continuously operate without human intervention and the data can reveal the activity and growth of bee colonies. Especially, a swarming activity was successfully observed by the data, which shows a significant potential to recognize various activities of bee colonies. The highlights of this system are the capabilities of detecting diverse features, transmitting data wirelessly and that with a strong self-support ability. Because of these advantages, the system can operate for an exceeding long time without maintenance, which will largely benefit system deployment in the field. In the visible future, this system could contribute to the study of bee's behavior and the development of precision beekeeping.