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Comment by MechSkep | Hacker News Reader

One of my side projects is building a sensing electronics package to monitor the health and activity of beehives. The idea is to make it easier for someone just starting to maintain their hive.

Any one have feedback on the concept? Or features we haven't thought of?

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I'd love to hear more about it! What is it exactly that the package is sensing? I've often thought it would be interesting to record the internal buzzing of a hive, then go on observing the colonies behavior. I have found there is a subtle but noticeable shift in the sound of a hive that has gone queen less, and there is a distinct piping sound that queens will make before swarming or taking their virgin flight. https://archive.org/details/QueenBeesPiping

I've also heard rumors of old timers being able to tell when a colony is hungry just by putting an ear to the hive. It all makes me wonder what other kinds of information we could gather by studying the buzz.

We certainly have a microphone. There is such a richness in the sounds a colony produces. Our minimal sensing package also contains temperature and humidity sensing. We're shooting for collecting a labeled data set this coming season to see what we can pull out of the information we collect.

I know nothing about beekeeping but having read the article it seems that weight would be an important measure.

Presumably the weight change you're looking to monitor mainly is volume of honey produced? Perhaps there's an analogue for that - maybe reflectivity of the frames or opacity to IR or some such?

Perhaps even just look at the heat retention against time accounting for external temperature (eg cooling rate at night vs. the ambient cooling curve) as that will give you the thermal capacity which should increase with increased honey volume. That should give you a first-order approximation at least (humidity would factor in to rule out waterlogging, not sure what the other main causes of hive weight change are beyond bee numbers which you'll also presumably have from the audio-volume and/or the ingress-egress readings).

Throw some load cells on the base. Hell, you could make a frame that acts like a 1 load cell bench scale, it's not like it'll weigh too much.

Weight is another good one, it drives our complexity and cost up but is hugely important. Most extant hive monitoring tools record weight. NASA uses some of these measures to track mass flow rates of nectar.

I came across an open source initiative to beekeeping; one that includes a sensor to monitor bee health and the activity of the colony.

If you haven't heard of it or checked it out, I recommend taking a look at what they've put together and maybe working with them (I also realize this may actually be YOUR project... if that is the case, please disregard).

OpenSourceBeehive (http://www.opensourcebeehives.net/index.html)

Ah, well here is where I could use some advice. I disagree with the way they have gone about their hardware both in the sensing electronics and the hive box itself. I don't want to go into it here; I'd feel a bit rude criticizing someone else's work in a public forum.

Should you approach someone for collaboration if you don't agree with how they're going about the project?

I agree (in that I wasn't impressed by that project) :) - also trying to find time to build temp/humidity/weight/sound monitoring. Would be interested to hear your thoughts. monsterlemon@gmail.com

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