Beekeeping in the future — Smart apiary management

Future of the traditional beekeeping is to implement smart apiary management and start to use automatic and remote tools for bee colony monitoring together with beehive control mechanisms to improve bee colony productivity. Within the ERA-NET ICT-Agri project “ITAPIC” different bee colony monitoring and control systems together with its combinations were introduced and analysed. This paper presents authors vision for implementation of Precision Beekeeping together with the smart apiary concept. Different parameters of the bee colony can be monitored: temperature, humidity, gas content, sound, vibration etc. Continuous monitoring of some bee colony parameters is very challenging and not user friendly, allowing using it only for research purposes, not for practical implementation by the beekeepers. Precision beekeeping idea is to introduce tools that can be easily implemented into beekeeping practice. This paper describes developed systems and its combinations for successful smart apiary management. Developed systems are based on temperature, sound and video monitoring. Both data transmission types: wired and wireless are applied and compared. As well discussion of automatic beehive heating or/and cooling system implementation into practice is opened. As apiaries usually are placed outside in rural areas, important part of the smart beekeeping is usage of alternative energy for powering all the devices. Most suitable alternative power supply to this moment is usage of solar power with solar panels, which can be mounted on the hive. Together with hardware part it is needed to develop software part for data observation. Software part should be developed as a web system or/and mobile application. Cloud system with decision support functionality and with additional option for informing the beekeepers about changes in the state of the bee colonies could be considered as well.