HiveTool.org

Links to hives have moved to hivetool.net

HiveTool

HiveTool is a collection of readily available, off-the-shelf hardware and free, open source software that continuously monitors a beehive. Computerized hive monitors provide realtime and historic data and graphs of weight, internal and ambient temperature, humidity and light levels which give the beekeeper a noninvasive view into the hive.

• Hivetool.org - Documentation, instructions, and a forum for discussions on how to set up a bioserver to monitor a bee hive.

• Hivetool.net - Access the network of monitored hives: status, graphs, download data, view the video feeds.

Uses

Hive Management

Knowing what is happening in the hive is crucial to proper hive management. By knowing the beginning, end, and quantity of nectar flows, bee keepers can determine when to add and remove supers, when to move hives and where to locate hives to maximize honey production. Read More

Climate and Land Use Research

Plant/pollinator interaction is used to measure the performance of the environment, instead of the performance of individual hives. Read More

http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov

Education and Bee Science

Read More

• South Carolina Hive Instrumentation Project
• Bioacoustics
• Bioservers
• Visual Bee Counter
• History
• Colony Collapse

Hardware

A scale hive (or bioserver) consists of a computer (desktop, laptop, router, SBC/SOC such as Raspberry Pi), which is used to record, display, and analyze data from sensors such as scales, thermometers, hygrometers, microphones, cameras, photocells and raingauge. Listed below are readily available, commercial, off the shelf products that are currently in use or undergoing development and testing. Read More

Software

This project uses free open source software (FOSS). The operating system is Linux although everything should run under Windows. The Perl module GD::Graph is used to plot the data. The graphs and data are displayed with a web server, usually Apache. Read More.

How To

User manual, construction plans. Read More

Hive Selection and Manipulation

Guidelines from Protocol for Scale Hive Measurements of the Honey Bee Nectar Flow. Read More

About

This open source project is comprised of beekeepers who work in electronics and information technology. Our goal is to produce software tools to monitor, manage and research bees and honey production. Read More

To Do

Lots to do! Whether you are a web site developer, database administrator, or programmer, there is something for you. Look over the list below - Read More

Why

Why put a computer in a hive? Read More