Low cost platform for monitoring honey production
and bees health
George Calin Seritan, IEEE Member,
Bogdan-Adrian Enache,
Florin Ciprian Argatau,
Felix Constantin Adochiei
Measurements, Electrical Apparatus and
Static Converters Department
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
bogdan.enache2207@upb.ro
Abstract— This paper presents the construction of a low cost
platform for monitoring honey production and bees health in a
small colony. The proposed system monitors: the weight, the
outside and inside temperatures, the humidity and the CO2
concentration of the beehive. Based on the gathered data the
system can estimate the honey production, the health of the bees
and possible pests like: Aethina tumida beetle, Varroa destructor
mite, etc. Unlike other systems on the market that monitor only
honey production or bees health the proposed system evaluates
both and sends a phone message to the beekeeper if any problem
arise.
Keywords— Bees, Temperature monitoring, Honey weight,
Bees pests
I. INTRODUCTION
In the last years, all over the world, a decrease in the
number of bee Apis mellifera colonies has been noticed. In
North America, since 2007 the average loss rate of bee
colonies is 29.6% [1] and similar numbers were reported in
Europe and Asia [2].
This phenomenon is a major concern for researchers who
struggle to find and remove its causes. It is called colony
collapse disorder (CCD) and until now there is not a valid
theory that explains it, only some presumptions. The only sure
thing about CCD is that it has multiple causes [3] among which
were identified: pest, parasites and environmental stressors.
The environmental issues are linked to the wide use of
pesticides and herbicides in agriculture that even in small doses
can kill or affect the memory and navigation system of worker
bees and led to the unsuccessful homing [1].
The pest and parasites are another factor that left untreated
can led to CCD. Among these some of the new entries are
Aethina tumida beetle and Varroa destructor mite. The Aethina
tumida beetle, also known as small hive beetle (SHB) is native
to sub-Sahara Africa, but in the last years is migrated to North
America, Canada, Europe and Asia. It feeds on pollen, honey
and bee brood and is most active during the day when the
worker bees leave the colony. The female beetle lays eggs
inside the bee colony which start to hatch only when the
temperature is above 34 ºC. The mature larva leaves the
beehive to enter the soil to pupate and after, the adult beetle
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Stefan Toader
Master degree student at
University Politehnica of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania
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returns to the colony to feed and mate [4]. In small numbers the
beetle is not a big concern, but considering its reproduction rate
it can disrupt the functionality of a small colony in a few
weeks.
The Varroa destructor mite is a parasite that specialized
their life cycle around the life cycle of the bee. It lays its eggs
inside the bee brood before it is capped with wax. The mite
inside it feeds on the bee larva just enough to leave it capable
of breaking the wax. The weaken larva is has a reduced life
span and sometimes develops mutations like no wings. It also
becomes a vector to infect other bees from the same colony or
nearby ones [5].
Due to the fact that this pests and parasites are new to
Europe it is becoming clear that special measures need to be
taken to limit their effect. Several devices are already available
on the market but they are monitoring general parameters like:
weight, temperature and humidity, and only a few of them have
health monitoring functions like: identifying if the queen has
stopped laying and the colony has become broodless, tracking
the nectar flow, etc.
Following a different directions there are a series of
devices that are specialized only in bees health detection. These
systems use sound or video signal to identify sick bees. In [6] is
presented an acoustic system that detects differences in the
sound spectrum that bees produce. The aim of the system is to
detect pest infestation inside a colony. In [5] a video detection
system is presented. The device consists in an elaborate
entrance system that separates the bees and an imagine
processing unit that detects spots on the bees. Using pattern
recognition software the system is able to detect Varroa
destructor mite infestation.
The main idea of this paper is to present the development of
a low cost platform that monitors honey production and bees
health. The proposed system has the advantage that combines
the honey production system with a bees health monitoring
system while it keeps the cost function to a minimum and is
autonomous. The proposed system is meant to be accessible to
a large number of beekeepers and measures all the general
parameters for honey production like: inside and outside
temperatures, humidity and weight and the CO2 concentration
to determine bees health. The monitored data are sent to the
beekeeper via SMS at his request, or if the colony is in danger.
To make the system autonomous a PV panel and a Li-Ion
battery are used as a power source.
The paper is structured as it follows: in Section 2 is
presented the hardware and software setup needed to gather all
the data, while in Section 3 all the results are analyzed and
discussed. The final part is reserved for the Conclusions and
future developments.
II. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE SETUP
A. Hardware setup
All the hardware setup is built upon an Arduino Nano unit,
which collects am processes the data from all the sensors:
weight, temperature and humidity, CO2 - Fig. 1.
The CO2 sensor is designed to work with Arduino systems
and is composed of an electrochemical gas sensor model
MG811 and all the conditional circuit necessary. Thas gas
sensor has a Tin Dioxide (SnO2) sensitive layer, measuring
Au and Pt electrodes and a Ni-Cr alloy heater that are fixed
into a crust made by plastic and stainless steel net. The heater
provides the necessary temperature for the sensitive elements.
The sensor is specially designed to measure CO2, but it can
measure other gases too.
The CO2 gas sensor modifies its sensing resistor in
concordance to the concentration of the measured gas. The
sensitivity characteristics of the sensor are extracted from its
data sheet and presented in Table 1.
TABLE I. GAS SENSOR SENSITIVITY CHARACTERISTIC

C[ppm] 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 2000 3000

U[mV] 325 319 315 311 308 305 303 295 287

By plotting the data on a logarithmic scale and using curve

fitting techniques we were able to obtain the relation between
the output voltage and the CO2 concentration - Fig. 2.
The equation that best fit the sensor data is a logarithmic
Fig. 1. Hardware setup – block diagram one:

The weight sensor is composed of a load cell model TAL

200, that is placed under the hive. The cell is made up of four U OUT = −17.97 ⋅ ln(C ) + 429.67 (2)
strain-gauges and two precision resistors that are connected in a
Wheatstone bridge formation powered at VIN = 5 V. where C - is the concentration of the CO2 in ppm at 33%
The measured voltage at the output of the bridge follows RH and 20 °C.
the relation: The distress data or the measured values are send to the
beekeeper using a GSM Arduino Shield SIM808 and a GSM
SIM card. This shield consists of a quad-band SMT
 R3 R2  GSM/GPRS αmodule
VOUT =  +  ⋅ VIN (1) + β = χ.with a(1) processor
(1) and only one
AMR926EJ-S chip. This solution benefits of small dimensions,
 R3 + R4 R1 + R2  low power consumption and low price.
where R1,2,3,4 are the resistance of the four strain-gouges.
Due to the fact the variance of the output resistance is very
small with the weight, the output of the bridge is connected to a
conditional circuit which produces a measurable result. The
value resulted from the load cell is converted in a number with
two decimals through HX711 integrated circuit.
Using a well known 50 kg weight we obtain at the output of
the HX711 circuit the value 78.85 which led to the
determination of the weight scale constant at CS = 78.85/50 =
1.577 value/kg.
Overall the accuracy of the system is of ±100 grams and
weight range is 10 - 200 kg.
For measuring temperature and humidity the platform uses
Fig. 2. The CO2 sensitivity characteristics
an integrated circuit AM2301. The circuit has a serial output
which sends at every two second the measured values. The
To power all the components an ECO-WORTHY 12V and
domains of the sensor are -20 to +80 ºC for temperature, and 0
10W solar panel is used. The panel powers the platform
to 100% for relative humidity. The accuracy is 0.3 ºC,
through a DC/DC buck converter model D24V22F5 that
respectively 3% RH.
outputs 5.5 V. The DC/DC converter is hooked up to the input
of the battery management system (Battery Babysitter) that temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration at every 15
charges a 4 parallel 3.7 V and 2000 mAh Li-Ion battery pack minutes. All these values were obtain using a simple K-mean
for assuring autonomy during the night. The management algorithm from 20 readings and then averaged between them.
system uses a BQ24075 battery charger and a BQ27441-G1A
fuel gauge to provide 1.5 A constant current - constant voltage
(CC-CV) charging for the battery pack. The rest of the power is
used to power the rest of the system. The system peak current
is about 550 mA and regular working current is 125 mA, so the
battery assures an autonomy of almost 3 days.

B. Software setup
The main purpose of the software setup is to process the
data from the sensors and send it to the beekeeper in an
intelligible format.
Except the temperature sensor that provides a digital
output, all the other sensors provide an analog one.
The software organizational chart is presented in Fig. 3. Fig. 4. The implementation of the platform

The gathered data were process differently depending on

their purpose. The weight and humidity were used to evaluate
the honey production while the temperature and CO2
concentration were used to analyze the bees health.
The evolution of the honey production during May 2017 is
presented in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5. Honey production during May 2017

Fig. 3. Software organizational chart

The software setup makes use of the software libraries

especially developed for the utilized shields such as:
SimpleDTH library for the temperature and humidity sensor
and GSM library for the GSM shield.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The proposed platform was assembled on a beehive from a
small colony situated in Slanic Prahova county - Fig. 4.
The hive with the platform mounted on was set in the
colony and the data were recorded from April until July 2017.
The weight, temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration
were saved as separate subsets in an array structure for etch day
at etch hour. In order to save power the values were recorded as Fig. 6. The evolution of the temperature for 18.05.2017
follows: the weight was measured twice in an hour, the

Fig. 7. The evolution of the temperature during a day in May from the
literature
The data from Fig. 5 were correlated to the evolution of the
humidity and temperature and a good correlation was found. In
the case of a greater humidity than the optimal value of 40%,
the bees begin the ventilation in order to eliminate the water
from the nectar, and the production of honey diminishes.
The main reason for inside temperature monitoring – Fig. 6
is to maintain a good health of the offspring [7]. If the
temperature gets too high the offspring could die or develop
malformation. To determine if there is a problem or not, the
measured temperature values are compared to a temperature
pattern obtained from literature [8] - Fig. 7. The data were
found to be in good correlation.
As [8] suggests the maximum tolerance for the inside
temperature is 1 °C, but it needs to take into account the
outside temperature and the humidity. In our case we made the
following correlation: if the humidity is less then the optimal
40% value and the outside temperature is within 2 °C of the
average of the month, we consider the tolerance to be 2 °C, else
if the humidity is over 40% and the outside temperature is in
the same range, the tolerance is 1 °C.
A similar approach is used to determine the bees health
from the CO2 concentration. We recorded the values for several
months and consider them to be the baseline. Now the
observed CO2 concentration pattern is very simple during each
morning the CO2 concentration drops with 10 - 15% and is
restored at every evening. If Varroa destructor mite or Aethina
tumida beetle affect the colony the CO2 concentration will not
have these drops due to the fact that more bees are within the
colony or once the bees left the beetles take their place.
To maintain a good health of the bees every time the
temperature exceeds the tolerance, or the CO2 concentration is
constant or raises during a day a distress signal is sent via GSM
to the beekeeper to intervene.
Every time the beekeeper wants to know the state of the
colony he can send an empty SMS to the number of the GSM
module. In a period of ten seconds, it will receive a text
message on his phone. In this period, there are made 20
verifications, and the average value and the data are sent as an
SMS.
The next step in this project is to develop a Zigbee sensor
network for the entire colony that will feed the data to a central
unit that can estimate the health and honey production for all
the hives using the principles presented in [9] and [10].
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper a low cost platform for monitoring honey
production and bees health is presented. The platform has all
the function of a professional device and some extra health
features. The cost of the platform is around 300€ which is
about 45% from the cost of an average GSM scale. The
platform can be used for the entire season from when the
temperature exceeds 14 °C until the bees go into hibernation
due to its solar power source. At any time the honey production
can be measured by using the weight function of the system
and by measuring the temperature, humidity and CO2
concentration the health of the bees can be evaluated.
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