IoT Application in Monitoring Stingless Beehives and Stingless Bee Health

Abstract

In Malaysia, there are varieties of stingless bee species, but only 9 species are suitable for farming. For commercial purpose, only 2 species are mostly used for farming which is H.Itama and G.Thoracica that very active in the production of honey and propolis. It is important to keep the beehives in good condition for the bees working. Colony loss is the main problems were affected by many of factors. The stingless bees are very sensitive to the surrounding changes. With an eye toward lessen the loss of colony and honey production impact, a development of Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring stingless bees and stingless bee health is being carried out at stingless beehive to monitor the habitat environmental need for productive and healthy colonies. Therefore, the objective of this project are to investigate the parameters to be monitored that affect the behaviour of the stingless bees and production, to select suitable sensors to measure the parameters, to integrate and test the sensors on a selected microcontroller system, to investigate and integrate Internet of Things (IoT) platform and to demonstrate the prototype for monitoring stingless beehives and stingless bee health. The parameter that will be measured including temperature and humidity inside the hives, smoke gas around the hives and weight of the hives are measured by using suitable sensors. With WI-fi connection, the data can be transfer to the Cloud and able the beekeepers to monitor on User-Interface at the webpage on any smart devices for the status update. In this preliminary implementation, the IoT real-time monitoring system to measure parameters of temperature, humidity, weight, and smoke of hive has been built. The behavior and health of stingless bees have been analyzed. Therefore, it can be concluded that the implementation of IoT monitoring could solve the problem of colony loss face by the beekeepers.