Hive monitoring - DIY

[gavin]

The Deluxe version would have the next stage whereby the LC resonance circuit thingie on the queen is adapted to permit electromagnet harvesting of mating queens . Yup, you've spotted it, I'm out of my depth.

But if you can stick a blob of paint on a virgin queen, they'll also take a thin circle of foil or something metallic and still get out to find the boys at the right time.

Yes, that weather station might do a basic job, DR, but my colleagues have their eyes on a professional-level system which means £££.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi Gavin
I haven't marked virgin queens except by accident and i blamed that for one being bumped off and chucked out the front door by the bees in 2000 (blue marking)
I see that some people do though so it must be possible
The reason I mentioned the UV paint is its invisible except under UV light
UV LEDs are plentiful and so she would be easy to spot leaving a mininuc

Anyway turns out lots of birds can see things in UV light and bees themselves see patterns in flowers that are only visible in UV
Which means she might as well have a big red blue and white target on her back anyway

[fatshark]

But if you can stick a blob of paint on a virgin queen, they'll also take a thin circle of foil or something metallic and still get out to find the boys at the right time.

If my first attempts with marking disks, a small tube of superglue and a queen are anything to go by she'd not be going anywhere ... unless she was strong enough to tow a poorly aerodynamic beekeeper stuck to her thorax with her

I'm also out of my depth with the PIC chips and am rather hoping Colin is going to save us. I do have something that - to a fashion - works and hope to resolve power over the next month so that I have a functioning 'solution' (Ha! ... some chance) to stick into a hive as soon as practical. I suspect there are going to be a number of practical issues such as probe placement, wiring etc. that will still take some sorting out. I'm still hoping to negotiate power/wifi at one apiary but in the first instance am restricting myself to local recordings, rather than real-time data.

PS There's an interesting approach to sound recording in the hive here

[Emma]

Someone was asking about entrance monitors?
In 2014 I saw a device created by an Italian company. It was a big plastic entrance block, with 14 one-beeway entrance holes. It simply counted the number of bees that came out and the number that came back in, continuously. The guys demonstrating it gave several examples of why this was a useful parameter to monitor. One was the reduction in foraging intensity which is said to precede a swarm. Monitoring this from a distance might help predict swarming. (I can't remember the other examples offhand, & I'm a few hundred miles away from my notes!)
The company is still going but seems to have expanded beyond that initial focus to monitoring other parameters such as weight... http://melixa.eu/en I'm hard pushed to understand much more, tho' the limits of Google translate are beginning to shed light on some of the documents I get from my Italian colleagues
[This obscure snippet of info was brought to you courtesy of the StarTree research project! - star-tree.eu]

[fatshark]

A weatherproof/waterproof case for your microprocessor-based weather station/hive monitor/bee counter ... though I'd want to be using a more reasonably priced container, perhaps these from Tesco together with some cable gland connectors.

[Colin]

The weather-proofing link illustrates to me just how many different problems there are to solve here. Phew.

I guess, as an engineering project, the first thing to be done would be to gather the "requirements". That may be tricky as there are different people here with their own aims and these may at times conflict. Bee counting or queen tracking would likely not be compatible with a low-cost, low-power system (one which could run off a "reasonable" size of battery for a "reasonable" length of time, and thus not need to support the cost of solar re-charging).

What would be great is if we could achieve some sort of modular design which supported everything from the lowest-end to the highest-end. Lowest-end perhaps means environmental monitoring and storage to non-volatile memory and could be powered either from battery or from some fixed DC power source. Highest-end would do the same but add (say) queen detection and video recording of queen entry/exit, uploading of this data to the cloud for remote monitoring, and a battery re-charging function. Could the highest end system use all the software and electronics designed for the lowest-end and then just add the new functions on top?

Arduino seems to fit this model of design with all the "shields" that can be added on to the base board. Is a PIC-based system also possible?

I spoke to a friend briefly yesterday, a chap who has designed numerous systems using PICs (he is a now-retired medical physicist). He likes PICs because they get the designer closer to the micro-controller itself rather than hiding the details of the functions from the user. While I can agree with him in some ways (it's always nice as an engineer to know exactly what is going on) I don't know that is the right way to look at it here, as the harder we make the task of writing software, the fewer people will get involved in making a contribution to writing and debugging code.

In addition, I have not found general-purpose PIC-based boards at prices like those that you can get Arduino boards for. It looks like we could probably buy PICs from Farnell (or other) reasonably cheap and design a system with EEPROM+PIC but then we need to design a PCB too, and put the board together. That sounds like a lot of work. And creating this as a platform which was convenient for adding other modules on top of it sounds very hard to get right.

So for the moment I would say that I would lean towards Arduino rather than PIC (or other micro-controller).

Anyway, I've just done a typical engineer thing there - tried to come up with a solution rather than agree the requirements first. Tsk tsk.

What is the best way to gather requirements? A stream of posts on a forum certainly isn't. Maybe it's a Wiki. Does vBulletin support Wiki pages? I have a colleague who I shall see again on Monday and I can ask him about this, as well as some chat about Arduino developments (he's the guy with the temperature monitors in his house and shed).

And happy new year everyone!

Cheers
Colin

[gavin]

Anyway, I've just done a typical engineer thing there - tried to come up with a solution rather than agree the requirements first. Tsk tsk.

What is the best way to gather requirements? A stream of posts on a forum certainly isn't. Maybe it's a Wiki. Does vBulletin support Wiki pages? I have a colleague who I shall see again on Monday and I can ask him about this, as well as some chat about Arduino developments (he's the guy with the temperature monitors in his house and shed).

Interesting thought. Yes, there are vBulletin add-ins that any competent Administrator ought to be able to install .....

Could take some time on my part.

[The Drone Ranger]

Thanks for your thoughts on that Colin
I think you are right about Arduino because anyone can get involved then
Perhaps a simple Poll on what people are most interested in monitoring might be a place to start Gavin ?
Then perhaps think about what we would learn by monitoring Vs the difficulty of achieving that
(I'm not that keen on weather monitoring because I can already tell what its like looking out the window )
Udemy have some courses on sale at the moment is anyone is interested
https://www.udemy.com/courses/search...rc=sac&lang=en

[fatshark]

I'd like a detector for mice. Little b'stards. Just discovered a nuc destroyed by a couple of them this morning That's the first colony I've ever lost to rodents overwinter ... and all through my own stupidity as I'd omitted (forgotten or chose not to?) to put a mouseguard in place across the cavernous entrance of one of the poly Everynucs. Idiot.

As an aside ... I treated this nuc with vaporised OA on the 9th of December. Since I don't open colonies to treat them I've no evidence that the mice were in residence. If they weren't they've caused very widespread devastation in just 3 weeks. If they were then they exhibited no ill effects from inhaling the vapour and scuttled off with no signs of wheezing.

[fatshark]

And in response to DR ...

I'm after 3-4 temperature readings.
Brood, hive, ambient, external (I have colonies in a bee shed so ambient and external may not be the same)
Hive humidity
Sound in the 180-275Hz range.

My interests are a) how much my bee shed helps 'protect' colonies and, indirectly, whether the brood rearing period is longer 'indoors', and b) how a variety of "treatments" (primarily vs.Varroa) disturb the colony. For example, can you determine whether the queen has stopped laying in response to Apiguard treatment? How quickly do a colony treated with vaporised OA settle?

I've chosen the Arduino route 'cos I more or less understand what I'm doing, whereas I'm all at sea when I've looked through the PIC18/32 documentation. The advantages are laid out by Colin. The disadvantages are their power demands and - at least for some of the hardware - the cost.

I'm happy I can measure temperature and humidity. I've got a microphone and some of the necessary bits for solar power on order. However, for a low power Arduino you almost certainly need to build your own ... this also allows you to change the voltage regulator for a more efficient one or omit it altogether and use a couple of AA cells.