A honeybee hive monitoring system: From surveillance cameras to Raspberry Pis

In recent years, there has been a significant loss in the number of honeybee hives due to several natural phenomena that are referred to as the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Several research programs have been established to monitor honeybee hives and to understand the behavior of the bees. A reliable monitoring system is important as it provides the beekeepers an opportunity to remotely observe the progress of their hives without the need to actually open them. This paper will present the results of several years of study and investigation for creating a reliable and inexpensive hive monitoring system. Our goal has been to create an inexpensive and modular system which sends sensor data acquired from beehives to a server for further analysis. Our initial efforts utilized video surveillance system but evolved to a more reliable system that utilizes Raspberry Pis and ATmega328Ps as its framework. This paper will provide details on the initial system and how it evolved to a new system that we are calling Beemon with its data acquisition capabilities. The early video and audio recordings obtained by the system are used in some image and signal processing analysis which are not presented on this paper.