Hi:
 
We have your electronic  hives, 13 at this time, 7 out of doors, 6
indoors.  They are wired to PCs.  We measure temperature, RH, weight of
hive, use bi-directional counters to monitors bees going in and out,
atmospheric conditions (i.e., weather), and eventually will add air flow
in the hives.  Our outdoor hives are also plumbed with probes and
fittings to look at chemicals (i.e., bee metabolic products, volatiles
from pollen, wax, honey, volatiles from the hive boxes, and any other
chemicals in the hive).  Motor driven pollen traps monitor pollen
harvesting by time of day and provide additional samples.
 
To top this all off, we process the bee activity and weather data using
artificial neural networks, a form of pattern recognizing, self-learning,
articial intelligence.  Eventually we hope to use this information to
improve or replace our current models of how bees respond to
environmental factors ranging from mites to industrial chemicals.
 
Which of these metrics is the most useful remains to be seen.  We got all
of this up and running last summer.  Will spend the winter improving the
system.  Should be going full speed next summer at locations in the
Pacific Northwest and the East coast of the U.S.
 
The one surprise to date is that we underestimated the PC needs.
Currently, we have four computers and a data logger on-line.  The bee
counter proved to be the most difficult.  We are getting bi-directional
counts from 15 channels (doorways) per hive from sets of ten hives.
Serial ports are just to slow.  Most advertised A/D systems do not work
at the speeds claimed - we have had to turn products back three times.
Finally found a modular parallel port feed that is fast!
 
We are using nucleus colonies, so 15 channels/hive is sufficient.  Hope
to have pictures of this system on the WWW shortly.
 
We intend to publish both the ciruit diagrams and the source code for the
data processing.  I don't  have much patience for the trend over the last
ten years to tell people about such technology but not share it.  I know
people in the U.S. and Europe who hope to make lots of money selling
these devices, but they aren't cheap and I can't imaagine that many
customers.  However, the components are not that bad, so anyone with a
soldering gun, a little time, and some patience can duplicate what we are
producing.
 
Cheers
 
Jerry Bromenshenk
Bob Seccomb
The University of Montana
[log in to unmask]
 
P.S.  I dream up this stuff, Bob does all the hard work designing and
testing it.