We are very excited to announc
e that The Bee Informed Partnership has joined together with our home institution, University of Maryland College Park, to launch a kick starter campaign to help fund our Sentinel Hive Scale Project! Similar to the Hive Scale Program, Sentinel Hives monitor honey bee health in real-time using hive scales to track colony weight gain or loss. In addition to weight measurements, monthly disease assessments will be implemented and pollen traps will be utilized to determine available plant forage. This combination of information from our “smart hives” will give insight to what is happening within the colonies.
This particular campaign is to fund 8 sentinel hive systems throughout Maryland. The scale data is automatically transmitted to our servers and the patterns of nectar flow mapped. This will provide a regional snapshot of what is g
oing on in our monitored hives, which can be relayed to a greater area of Maryland. The goal is to collect enough information so that Sentinel Hives become early warning systems and we can alert beekeepers of potential problems due to increases in disease or lack of nutritional resources. Eventually, this project could spread nationally as a network of information providing beekeepers everywhere with data driven best management practices in real time, improving honey bee health for all beekeepers.
The crowd funding platform through the University of Maryland is called UMD LAUNCH and through this initiative our goal is to use crowd sourced funding to help launch the next innovation in Apiary Management. This campaign runs through October 22nd and you can support our team at any time! All contributions are tax-deductible.
Follow the link below to find out more about our citizen/scientist partnership.
