Bee Happy

Vision

BeeHappy is a smart system with the aim to help amateurs and professionals in the field of beekeeping, making it easier to manage a smart hive with a focus on the workspace of the beekeeper and the envoronment.

Mantaining a productive hive requires time and energy. BeeHappy will take the work away from the hands of the beekeeper:

  • Where did the bees swarm? BeeHappy knows, it manages to alert the beekeper in case of swarms and tracks the direction;

  • No more need to walk ten kilometers at five in the morning, BeeHappy will feed the hive regurarly and smartly for you;

  • Are the bees angry at you? I’m joking, but BeeHappy will calm down the bees during routine operations on site, for real.

  • Healthy and fit like a fish bee: BeeHappy will regulate temperature and humidity to kick off grooming behaviour on bees in order to prevent parasytes infection.

Bee Happy Features

Sensitive

The system is able to sense temperature, humidity and presence of bees and inform the beekeeper about the current situation

Responsive

The system is able to react in real-time to critical situations, easing the tasks of the beekeeper and ensuring healthier bees. It also helps the beekeeper calming the bees and activates cameras in case of sudden swarms, enabling the beekeeper to recover the lost insects.

Adaptive

A simple setup enables the beekeeper to place the system and be sure it adapts to the hive.

Transparent

Transparency is a core feature: the data collection is unnoticeable by the beekeeper.

Intelligent

Helping the beekeeper feed the bees, calming them and controlling the situation in real time is feasible thanks to an intelligent system that can be placed inside the hive, which can act without the beekeeper intervention.

AmI Steps

  • Sensing

Activity interference and regulations of food and grooming behaviour on the bees.

  • Reasoning

When you are away from the hive BeeHappy monitors the hive and reacts on swarms and sudden dangers. When you are near, BeeHappy regulates the fumes to calm the bees.

  • Acting

The system monitors humidity and temperature inside the hive in order to kick off grooming behaviour in bees, needed to prevent the proliferation of the Varroa Mite, a dangerous parasyte responsible for the death of entire swarms.

  • Interacting

Suggestions and controls of the hive. You can regulate the release of food and the parameters of the environment.

Specifications

You can browse a detailed explanation of:

  • Glossary
  • System requirements
  • System architecture
  • Components
  • Open issues

here.

Have some bees!

If only we were as organized as they are…

The Team

FAQ

Why BeeHappy?

Are you telling me you don’t know Bobby McFerrin?

Seriously though, bees are an essential part of our ecosystem. Life as we know it couldn’t be possible whithout bees. Learn more here.

Our mission is to integrate modern technologies into a respectful environment for both humans and bees.

How can BeeHappy help?

Beekeeping today is hard. If you ever had an experience on field, you would know that it can be time-consuming, repetitive and requires constant attention.

We aim to sustain the human on this task, to improve its experience and to allow more and more people to enter this field.

BeeHappy lifts the weight of repetitive tasks such as feeding and monitoring the hive, and offers assistance on the most intensive ones, such as smoke control and grooming.

How expensive is BeeHappy?

Our system is made of few components, the most expensive of which is a Raspberry Pi. We choose also not to use specific controllers or proprietary technologies to allow the geeks to reproduce and enhance our work. For this reason the software is FOSS and avaiable on our github repo.

Why REST + Nginx + Flask instead of Hipster Framework X?

We decided to leverage on boring techologies because we want a stable, tested and featureful developing environment that is also common knowledge.

Why is everything on the same Raspberry Pi instead of a distributed system?

Because hives are a microcosmos best considered independent one from the other. There isn’t a possibility of a central cordination endpoint when every hive has its own autonomous life.

What about internet connection?

Of course getting a Wireless connection working on a remote area is not always possible. First of all, there are situations where hives are stored in indoor facilities (mainly commercial solutions).

Also, an external 3g low-powered router can be used to enable wireless networking in vast rural areas, given that BeeHappy has low bandwidth requirements.