As both a bee keeper and retired engineer I liked the idea of a project to record how the weight of one of our beehives changed through the summer as well as the internal and outside temperatures. I'm familiar with the open-source Arduino microcontroller boards which are cheap and have many add-ons that will work with them.
Accordingly I set about designing an Arduino-based data logger that can run for months on a PP3 battery and record data on an SD card. Later, at the prompting of a brother-in-law in Spain who has bees at an apiary many miles from home, I added a GSM MODEM so that the data can be sent to a smartphone in an SMS message, instead of having to retrieve the SD card to view it.
I have described the data logger on this page. It could be adapted for many other purposes.
http://openengineering.scienceontheweb.net/Oe_DataLogger.html
The application to monitoring a beehive is described here, along with some graphs of the results.
http://openengineering.scienceontheweb.net/Oe_HiveMonitor.html
Some things that struck me about the results were:
- How, as many bee keepers notice, most of the honey flow occurs over only a few weeks where weather conditions are especially favourable.
- How the bees manage to maintain an astonishingly stable brood temperature.
- How you can see the bees steadily consuming stores in the night (the weight steadily falls) in order to generate the body heat to maintain the brood temperature.
Honey Flow over the summer. The drops at the end are when the 'supers' are taken off to harvest the honey.
Hive Temperature. The brood (larvae) are kept at a very constant 34C, whatever the outside weather!
Building a data logger like this takes a fair amount of electronics and software knowledge - and a lot of time! However the main parts are cheap,
commonly available modules, and you can experiment in constructing it and getting it working bit by bit. It could make an interesting project for a secondary school or university. I hope the details I have provided will help anyone who wants to try.
