A happy memory from my time teaching was helping to build a remote sensing platform to study honey bee colonies. The idea was simple: could we use affordable computers, sensors and cameras to collect information from a hive and make it available remotely? The answer, as it turned out, was yes.
Hive LCD screen – showing temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, sound amplitude, sound frequency and carbon dioxide.
The project was developed to support teaching and learning about honey bee colonies. Rather than simply talking about environmental conditions, students could design, build and programme a working system that measured variables inside and around a hive. Using a Raspberry Pi, a range of sensors, cameras and an internet connection, we were able to collect and upload data that could be viewed from anywhere.
I certainly wasn’t the expert when it came to the coding. The project was built with the help of master-coder Richard Todd, who very quickly showed me just how little I actually knew about computer programming! Fortunately, he was an outstanding teacher, and together we worked alongside our students to develop the system step by step. We worked collaboratively, with students asking great questions, testing ideas, solving problems and gradually building a platform that really worked. Once completed, the remote sensing unit became a regular part of our beekeeping lessons and continued to be used successfully until my retirement in 2023.
This download is a summary of many of the instructions and notes that went into building the remote sensing platform. It doesn’t cover everything and technology has moved on since we first developed the system, but many of the principles remain the same. If you’re thinking about building your own remote sensing unit to study honey bee colonies, it may well be worth a look. It may be a useful starting point for anyone interested in building something similar.
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