Firstly this is not an endorsement for any product or company. This is a description of my journey and the ups, downs and reasoning behind my discissions.
The Problem
2023 was an awful year for me with honey. I had 3 flow supers and one cut comb and a double brood for Queen rearing and I failed on all accounts. 4 jars of honey when 400 were expected!! So after a few days of throwing things around the shed and a few more days of sulking I began the self reflection part of the healing process and asked myself what went wrong? My conclusion was that the wasps and hornets had robbed me blind. BUT as I was the only one to blame, what had I done wrong? In hindsight I had lost control of my hives relying on the adage that “The beekeeper is the bees worst enemy” and using this as justification to not check up on the hives for a very long time left me totally blind to what was actually happening in the hives. I could have spotted the robbing if only I had been around. So why wasn’t I around. Well, I was busy. New house, new job, busy family and the bees just were not the priority. Every time I prepped for a hive inspection, I would put it off at the last minute for another couple of days as it wasn’t the “Right time.”
If only I had some sort of warning signal to say you need to check on them and this is now a priority for today and not tomorrow. Then I would probably have managed to make time.
My history with hive monitoring.
I have quite a history. I bought a monitoring hive heart a few years back and tried it in a hive. This was good for a bit but with nothing to compare it to didn’t really get me very far.
I then set up a beekeeping club at my work I thought it would be a really good idea to invest in some monitoring equipment so that I could have an online page allowing all the members of the university to monitor the bees and get involved with the beekeeping activities. using the app that allows you to download the data from the hives the idea was that an army of interested people would download the data as and when they passed which again would create interest in the hives. At this time I purchased the full setup being a hive heart, a set of scales and a bee counter that fits on the front of the hive for each for the two hives on campus.
These items arrived and within a week no longer worked. The scales were fully submerged in water. Discussions with the company regarding warranty and suitability of products in a climate such as the UK, where apparently it rains, proved fruitless with the company insisting that I had used them wrong, and that no-one had ever had them flood before. Hence this project died pretty swiftly.
My Solution for now.
Anyway, fast forward a few years and I’m back into looking for a solution that would allow me to monitor the beehives from a distance, alert me when there is a potential problem and force me to prioritise these to their rightful place in my overall list of day-to-day activities. I happened across an old hive heart from one of the previous setups that had avoided the bin or getting lost in the move and I managed to get it working again on the app with a bit of help from the online chat and put this into one of the hives. I then proceeded to check out a number of alternative technologies that would achieve my overall goal but found them to be excruciatingly expensive, bringing me back to the old beehive monitoring solution.
Figuring that they could have improved significantly in the preceding years I decided to give them another chance. Wanting real time data, I also got a GSM relay and a UK sim card from 1 penny mobile. I ordered 2 sets of scales and 2 hearts in October, in the hope that I could get them installed before it got too cold for winter. Unfortunately, the delivery got caught up in customs with no notice letter arriving and no instructions on how to release them, so after 4 weeks of waiting they got returned to sender.
One last go. I ordered a single GSM which was below the import duty of £163 and arrived beautifully. I ordered a pair of scales and hive hearts which this time turned up with a tracking letter and allowed me to pay the duty and have them delivered. Duty was a little painful, especially as the price of goods included the transport costs, but I guess the import duty would have been included with any other non UK supplier.
After install and monitoring for a few weeks I heard that prices were about to go up so I finished my ideal set up earlier than originally planned and ordered a few more. Total was 6 set-ups. This gives me the ability to compare the data. Learning from the past that what is interesting is the comparison between the hive behaviours. One hive going up by 2 Kg in a day and another coming down by the same is indicative of robbing and clearly identifies who is doing the robbing and from who.
My set-up for 6 hives is as follows:
XS scales. These flat bar scales have a flat surface. The cheaper ones have pins that would sink into my poly hives and result in no weight on the balance.
They unfortunate are not long enough to run side by side but instead go front and back.
A very important stick that holds the electronics box up. The waterproof box hangs down under the hive this stick supports the box so that any moisture that runs down the cables does not end up inside the (not so) waterproof box, killing the scales electronics. These were on special offer when I got them, along wiht a free hive heart.
Hive heart. can be placed facing downwards on top of the frames if you have bee space on the top. The hive heart does not actually fit well in the poly hives when they have a feeder or queen excluder on the top as there is not 8 mm space above the frames. This prevents the top sections from fitting snugly.
My solution is to affix the hive heart onto a frame using three drops of hot liquid glue and insert into the hive as a normal frame. I can position this frame towards the centre. 3 or 4 frames in from the edge so that the heart is genuinely in the heart of the hive. I think i will do this eventually for all the hives but for now just the poly ones. I really don’t want to open the hives for any longer than necessary at this time of year.
GSM gateway 2G with solar charger: Allows hourly readings to be broadcast to the cloud and saves me having to walk up the woods all the item to download the data which by then is very out of date. Fixed to one of the stand uprights using an old mobile phone bike holder. Taped around the sealing joins to add to the waterproofing. Really simple to install. Insert the sim and wait for the 1 hour. It just worked.
1 penny mobile SIM. This is a awesome cheap PAYG simcard on the EE network. 1p per MB as standard pay as you go with a £30 per year minimum spend. Total download for 2 scales and 2 hive hearts is about 0.6 MB per day. Highly recommend – click here for a discount on your own SIM.
With 6 hives each with hearts I am using ~1.5-2 MB per day. so 2 p of credit.
