In a message dated 01/26/2000 10:23:05 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< Can any of you that have some good ideas give me (and
 Jerry) a wish list of hive readouts you would like to have along with an
 explanation?  We're thinking of an operation that has more than a few hives,
but
 perhaps even a hobbyist with a few hives set up a long way from home could
 afford and benefit from such a system.
  >>
Hello Allen,

Well, I don't know if I have any "good ideas" but you've really got me
thinking about this.  It is possible to remotely monitor anything, if you are
willing to spend the money.  I happen to work in a public utility and we have
a substantial investment in remote monitoring equipment, especially in sewer
system pump stations (about 250 locations) and treatment plants.  We have
found that we save sufficient labor and avoidance of other expenditures by
the use of it, such that, the equipment really does pay for itself over a
span of time.  It seems that we need to think about things which will reduce
our labor or other costs.  If we knew that everything was going well at a
certain yard, we would not need to go there as often.  If we used the weight
of a hive as one of our monitoring parameters, we could discern a great deal.

If we could see the hives increasing in weight and the computer had a
database indicating the number of supers on a given hive, we would know our
reserve capacity for storage and possibly avoid a trip.  Perhaps a hive lost
considerable weight in one day.  Maybe it swarmed.  If a hive was not
increasing along with the others, we may have a mite problem or disease.  We
should go check it out.  We might even be able to see an outstanding queen
and be able to use our best producing hive as the one we would breed from.
The queen would be in the database anyway and we would know where she came
from and be able to go back to the source for more,  if we weren't breeding
our own.

We could also measure the humidity inside the hive as well as the temperature
and be able to see what these conditions were like in our best hives during
peak production.  We could measure many different parameters, all of which
may give us data to allow us to see the results of phenomena occurring within
our hives.  A measurement of our combined parameters occurring at swarming
events may yield a signature to help us avoid conditions which foster
swarming.

The apidictor is only one parameter which may help us in swarm prediction,
but I'll bet there are others, in combination with the apidictor, which will
help to nail it down more securely.  I believe the computer is really going
to be the interface of whatever hive happenings we decide to monitor.  Dick
Tracy really wasn't that far off of reality with his wrist communicators, now
was he?     Bob