The Bee Informed Partnership’s Electronic Hive Monitoring program gathers data from hundreds of electronic hive monitors located all over the USA. Much of this data is publicly available to the beekeeping community in a variety of actionable formats. For example, if you go over to the BIP research portal at research.beeinformed.org and click on Hive Monitors you can see a public gain/loss map that shows the 7 day moving average weight loss/gain of the hive monitors within that state. We are also doing algorithmic work on the data and attempting to discover more actionable information about colony health from this vast collection of electronically…
Author: Jonathan Engelsma
Jonathan Engelsma is a Professor of computer science at Grand Valley State University, where he is responsible for the Bee Informed Partnership’s hive scale portal implementation. Jonathan lead’s GVSU’s Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory and has numerous publications and patents in mobile computing. Dr. Engelsma earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 1993. He has over two decades of industry experience, including 16 years in various research and development positions with Motorola. Jonathan began keeping bees as a high school student in the 1980s, and today with his wife Mieke, maintains a small sideline beekeeping operation in the W. Michigan area.
SolutionBee delivers new NFC-enabled hive monitoring product
SolutionBee, widely known within the beekeeping community for its HM-20 Hive Monitor introduced several years ago, has now made its next generation Hive Monitor product, the HM-5 available. The form factor and functionality of the new HM-5 is very similar to the earlier HM-20. It collects both the weight, external temperature and humidity every 15 minutes. The beekeeper uses a mobile phone or tablet to collect the data periodically to transmit to the SolutionBee cloud portal, and optionally on to the Bee Informed Partnership. The unit uses four load cells and consists of a robustly manufactured scale platform with a weather proof enclosure for the…
How To Annotate Your BIP Hive Scale Data
Hopefully by now you all have your mites under control and are well on your way in preparing your hives for winter! If you are operating a hive scale and forwarding your data to the Bee Informed Partnership, as your beekeeping season begins to wind down and you have more time to spare, we'd strongly encourage you to login to the BIP hive scale portal and annotate your scale data. While many of the "BIP Ready" scales available to beekeepers today collect data well beyond hive weight, the weight of you colony is perhaps the most informative in understanding what is going on in the…
Adding Your Hive Scale to the BIP Public Map
Congratulations! You’ve purchased a shiny new hive scale from one of Bee Informed Partnerships “BIP Ready” hive scale vendors, and opted to share your scale data with BIP for the good of beekind and your fellow beekeepers on the BIP public map. Our users often ask how they can get their scale on the map, so consider this the definitive guide in getting your scale on the BIP map! It is possible that we are being a little presumptive here. Perhaps you’ve got a BIP Ready scale setup in your apiary, and you’re scratching your head wondering why you would want your scale data on…