I have had two of my hives on scales for the past year and change. I agree,
the data collected is like weather - extremely local. That said, it
*does* provide
valid and valuable information on ONE hive. How healthy and how much forage
is coming in each day. (a quantitative measure of flow!) As well as exact
date and time confirmation of swarming. I was able to record two swarms
from one hive of 8 and 12 lbs about three days apart. No swarms on the hive
next to it. Each colonies data has to be viewed on it's own.

I have been using a trimmed down version of HiveTool (Raspberry Pi, PERL
code, data stored as text in CSV, POE), with no wireless access (that is
where the cost savings comes in). I used strain gauges harvested from
bathroom scales. My intent was to make an implementation cheap enough to
attract the hobbyist beekeeper. (They generally have hives close to home,
so can pull power and upload data easily over CAT5.) My target has been the
price of wood or a package; about $100-150. It looks like Broodminder may
have beaten me to the target.

I have stored far more than a year of data on a USB memory stick, and can
monitor more hives than the two I currently monitor, so 'cloud' is not
necessary. It also means I free myself from the cost of a service - I own
my own data, on my own hardware. No ongoing costs for cloud service. My
tripping point was the strain-gauge hardware - scrapping bathroom scales
was not a reasonable business model!
That said - I will probably include more hives to my dataset. Hive weight
is useful!

-Jim

J. Jakim
g-voice msg. 916.304.5859
www.linkedin.com/in/jamesjakim/

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