Our Technology
Environmental Monitoring
We use weather stations and sensors around our beehives to capture the immediate climatology around the apiary location. Without the weather station the closest information is only available from the Australian Bureau of Meterology’s facilities usually from a location that is so distant from the apiary as to be irrelevant. Sensors and data loggers capture hive temperatures, humidity and bee counts and are assembled using sensors and data loggers from manufacturers like Digital Matter, and Definium.
Beehive Sensors
We monitor 25 percent of our colonies and track internal hive temperature, humidity, "smell" (basically the chemical signature of the pheromones inside the hive) and weight. We use equipment from Modusense - a New Zealand technology company. Our apiaries sites are typically set out as per the diagram below.
Imagery and Geospatial Data
There are many free geospatial data sources available to understand the nature of vegetation located in the 4-5 kilometres zone around each apiary. We use this information to undertake apiary site selection. We also use drones to conduct vegetation surveys to get a better idea of the immediate floral distribution in the vegetation categories identified in the geospatial data.
In this diagram, Location 1 represents the heart of our infrastructure providing a communications hub that gathers data from all the sensors within 4-5 kilometres (yes - we share this with local farmers and landholders if they are interested). This hub (or Gateway) is located high up on a hill in order to communicate to the sensors of the apiary as well as the local Telstra tower (Location 2) or satellite if cellular coverage is not available. The remaining locations in our apiary plan represent the various sensors that monitor the environment of the apiary site and the colonies. The weather station (Location 3), hive monitoring equipment such as a hive scale (Location 4), internal hive environment (Location 5) and apiary microclimate ( Location 6).
