A preliminary study of new technology for beehives monitoring

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is unquestionably considered an important and significant contributor among the animal pollinators, playing an essential role in the prosperity of the world’s ecosystems and indeed to life itself. The aim of this work was to study a procedure that could integrate visual observations carried out on the families and measurable parameters such as sound, temperature, humidity, CO2 and hive weight, in order to detect information of the state of the hive. The parameters were acquired with sensors placed in the hive. The system was installed in a colony composed by three bee hives positioned within the University Campus. Bees families were evaluated once a week, looking at morpho-productive characters: queen´s prolificacy, brood´s capacity, family strength, brood´s viability, increased amount of wax combs in the nest, the quantity of honey and bee bread accumulated in the nest. An hardware platform and a software system to acquire and analyze data from the sensors supports the analysis of the data obtained from the observations. In this context, the proposed work aims at studying and developing an innovative system capable of giving to the beekeepers an early analysis of beehives condition, detecting anomalous situations and predicting particular event. In this work, preliminary results will be reported. This study was financially supported by the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy, within the project “NuHive: New technology for beehives monitoring”.