Embedded Wireless Stingless Beehive
Monitoring And Data Management System
Noor Hafizah Khairul Anuar
School of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, Malaysia
Faculty of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi MARA
Pasir Gudang, Malaysia
noorhafizah2575@uitm.edu.my
Sallehuddin Ibrahim
Control and Mechatronics Engineering
School of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, Malaysia
sallehuddin@utm.my
Mohd Amri Md Yunus
Frontier Materials Research Alliance
,
Control and Mechatronics Engineering
Division School of Electrical
Engineering, Universiti Teknologi
Malaysia
Skudai, Malaysia
amri@fke.utm.my
Shafishuhaza Sahlan
Control and Mechatronics Engineering
School of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, Malaysia
shafis@utm.my
Muhammad Ariff Baharudin
Control and Mechatronics Engineering
School of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, Malaysia
ariff@utm.my
Abstract—In this paper, an embedded wireless stingless bee
monitoring system, which investigates the environment’s
temperature and humidity effect on the bee activity and honey
production of Heterotrigona Itama, a stingless bee species, is
presented. The variables observed by the system are the weight
of the honey container, the temperature inside the hive,
humidity inside the hive, temperature of the environment
outside of the hive, the humidity of the environment outside of
the hive, and bee activity counter. The sensors used are Strain
Gauge Load Cell (SGLC) sensor for weighing purposes, DHT22
sensors for temperature and humidity, and infrared
transceivers bee counter sensor for bee activity monitoring. All
installed sensors were controlled by using a NodeMCU
microcontroller. All data were recorded and transferred to a
Google Firebase real-time database. The proposed system offers
an android application to access the recorded data called EMAS
apps. EMAS fetches all the information from the database and
represents it on graphs and pages in the user smart devices. This
paper analyses the data obtained for 36 hours from a single hive.
Results obtained represent a relationship between the
temperature collected and bee activity with the honey produced.
It was observed that in the morning, the increase of temperature
leads to high traffic of bees going out of the hive, which decreases
the weight of the hive to 2.7 Kg. Meanwhile, in the evening, the
decrease in temperature leads to high traffic of bees going into
the hive, which increases the hive weight to 4.5 Kg. For future
work, to enhance the system’s performance, installation of the
embedded system into an array of hives was advised and long-
term data observation process was required.
Keywords—Heterotrigona Itama, embedded system, android
application
I. INTRODUCTION
Precision Beefarming (PB) is characterised as the apiary
management technique, which depends on the observation of
bee health state and increasing profitability [1]. The technique
collects and analyses a current state of a hive and sends early
warnings to beekeepers for immediate response. Temperature
and humidity are the most critical variables in beehive
monitoring. These variables can be used to evaluate the colony
condition [2], colony health level [3], the bees’ queen
condition, the respiration process in the hive, the level of the
fungus growth on the interior walls of the hive [4], and the
actual stage of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) [5].
There are three levels of data collection category. Firstly,
the apiary level, secondly the colony level, and thirdly the
individual bee level. The traditional monitoring system which
utilizes direct human observation and intervention is too
subjective and time consuming [6]. Moreover, the time span
for data collection` is limited and irregular, which depends on
weather conditions. Hence some important data might be lost
during the observation process. Human health and safety are
also at risk if overnight observation is required. However,
relocating the beehive closer to human residential areas for
easy monitoring can incite different kind of problems that
originate from the surrounding. This include as attracting
black soldier flies, predators to stingless bee as well as the
fogging activities performed in these residential areas to
control pests and insects [7].
Towards the industrial revolution 4.0, the ubiquity of
advanced wireless sensor network and information
technologies has been widely explored by researchers for
collecting physical items in a system equipped with “Internet
of Things (IoT)” [8]. Beehive monitoring which employed
modern technologies and techniques had made significant
progress in 2007 [9]. The applications utilizes invasive sensors
that inevitably made contact with the inner part of the hives or
bodies of the bees through the use of a thermocouple for hive
temperature monitoring [9] and Radio-Frequency
Identification (RFID) tags for bees foraging activity
monitoring [10]. Utilizing these techniques, the respective
hives need to be opened and exposed to the environment,
hence causing discomfort and stress to the bee colony during
the data collection, hence not favored in this research.
However, in recent years, the non-invasive sensors have been
heavily utilized that have the advantages of performing
continuous monitoring remotely.
The paramount importance of hive monitoring and data
collections is to monitor the development status of the bee
colony [11]. the collected data also is able to assist the
beekeeper in predicting some unusual events such as
swarming/pre-swarming [12], excessive honey spilt due to
infestation of invaders [13], death and absence of queen bees
[14], health and growth condition of the brood [15], dying or
starving of the bee colony due to lack of food, and the low
level of foraging activity [16]. Prompt actions from the
2021 IEEE International Conference in Power Engineering Application (ICPEA), 8-9 March 2021
978-1-7281-8546-0/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE 149
2021 IEEE International Conference in Power Engineering Application (ICPEA) | 978-1-7281-8546-0/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICPEA51500.2021.9417758
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