In comparison to the other high-tech gadgets available out there, the weight and temperature/humidity sensors offered by Broodminder.com look quite reasonable. (Full disclosure: I'm not associated with them nor have any financial or otherwise interest in that company). In comparison to a $500 scale offered by a competitor this one is a clever and simple design that looks basically like a 2x4 that you'd put under a hive stand - and it's much cheaper. The sensor slides under the inner cover and presto - you sync it with an app on your smartphone. I picked a set at EAS and installed it this weekend on one of my hives. The weight sensor is currently $160 with the goal of halving that when they ramp up production.

I don't want to revive the past discussions about the merits of weighing hives, but before you dismiss the idea, there's a catch that caught my eye: data from your sensors can be uploaded to the cloud (broodminder.io) and (presumably?) shared with others. They are aiming to have 10,000 of these sensors installed in the US by the end of next year.

Now, wouldn't it be cool to have 10,000 weight, temperature and humidity data covering the entire country and be able to correlate it with other available data? Blooming times or Grow Degree Days to correlate with honey flows, BIP colony survivor data (if they can be linked), etc. It seems that researches are always after good data and here's a chance to have really interesting (and continuous) stream of data to analyze. The possibilities seem endless...

Needless to say, this is great for backyard beekeepers or the weekenders like myself who cannot constantly observe what's going on. Commercial operations likely don't need a scale to tell them what's going on. In the last 24h since installing it, either the colony that I've put it on has swarmed (weight went from 118 pounds to 108.4) or the heavy rains that went through southern NY this weekend really wreaked havoc with the hive weight. In any case, this is one gadget that I can clearly find useful and interesting to have in my beekeeping toolbox.

Przemek

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