A Low-Cost, Low-Power, Multisensory Device and Multivariable Time Series Prediction for Beehive Health Monitoring

Abstract

We present a custom platform that integrates data from several sensors measuring synchronously different variables of the beehive and wirelessly transmits all measurements to a cloud server. There is a rich literature on beehive monitoring. The choice of our work is not to use ready platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi and to present a low cost and power solution for long term monitoring. We integrate sensors that are not limited to the typical toolbox of beehive monitoring such as gas, vibrations and bee counters. The synchronous sampling of all sensors every 5 min allows us to form a multivariable time series that serves in two ways: (a) it provides immediate alerting in case a measurement exceeds predefined boundaries that are known to characterize a healthy beehive, and (b) based on historical data predict future levels that are correlated with hive’s health. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of using additional regressors in the prediction of the variables of interest. The database, the code and a video of the vibrational activity of two months are made open to the interested readers.