(Elsevier, 2023-09) Aguirre Arribas, Fernando; Romero Hortelano, Miguel
Monitoring beekeeping processes is a research area that is increasingly attracting interest, not only in order to maximize honey productivity but also to preserve the bee’s health and its environment. This paper presents a low-cost low-invasive system that uses IoT technologies as MQ Telemetry Transport, MQTT, and Node-RED, in an open hardware platform easily reproducible and royalty-free, to capture in real-time valuable information in form of a 3D-grid to show how the bees are located within the hive during the winter months using spatial thermal data without the need to open the hive up, thereby preventing manual manipulation by the beekeeper which puts the bees welfare in jeopardy. This system can reveal unexpected or little-known bee behaviors, facilitating a more comprehensive analysis of the health and strength of a bee colony to help beekeepers make the most appropriate decisions to ensure the productivity of their hive.
