Honey bees are a keystone species that greatly contribute to the pollination of agriculture and natural ecosystems, while providing honey as a sweet byproduct. The BeeMoS project aims to develop an open source bee hive monitoring system in order to better appreciate the dynamics taking place at the level of the hive which can be seen as a “superorganism”. A component of the system will be dedicated to environmental variables (temperature, humidity, windspeed…) and another to the hive specifically (count of entering/exiting bees, weight, internal temperature…) using Arduino microprocessors.

Our ultimate goal is to make a self-reliant solar-powered system able to transmit data wirelessly at minimum cost, and to set up a public server that will gather the information collected from multiple apiaries in order to analyze trends within and between apiaries in relation to environmental variables.

Our project was recently launched at Hackuarium and we are looking for people interested in joining our team (especially electronics enthusiasts but also beekeepers interested in testing prototypes in the future or simply motivated people). Current schematics and codes are available at https://github.com/open-beehive