Tuesday, December 8, 2015

2015-12-08: BroodMinder Has Arrived

I'm very excited to say that my electronic hive temperature and humidity monitoring devices, aka the BroodMinder, have arrived!  If you've been reading this blog you know that I've been playing around with my own electronic hive monitoring electronics using an Arduino.  Although it worked, I couldn't really find a good way of deploying it and keeping it powered.  Well, some very talented people have done a lot more (and better) thinking about this and have made it a reality.  The weather is looking good this weekend and hopefully I will have them installed!


You can read all about how they work in the link to their Indiegogo page above, but basically you place the device right below your inner cover (above the brood) and using low power blue tooth it transmits the data to an app on your smart phone.  Pretty sweet!


BroodMinders ready to go!
I bought three of them and plan to place them on the cutout hive, the split (combined) hive and either the Green or White hive.  They both have the same number of boxes but one has an Italian queen and the other has the queen I bought from the Northern Bee Network.  I guess you'll find out which one I decided on after I deploy them.


The App
Hopefully these little gems will help me to monitor the hives over the winter without opening them. 


Until next time, thanks for reading!

2 comments:

  1. I saw those and was really tempted, but alas, I have no smartphone. I'm excited to find out how they work for you. Many times I have looked at my hives and needed to do a quick open to see how much action there is and it would be so much better if I could know without opening at all. Good luck!

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    1. I think it would work with any device that is BlueTooth capable that you could download the App onto. Something like a tablet maybe?

      Yeah, I'm excited to get them into the hives and measuring real data. I wouldn't mind trying to expand and improve my own Arduino setup using some of the same concepts. I think I'd try and get something like this (https://www.adafruit.com/products/2829) that runs on a lower voltage and uses the Low Energy BlueTooth to transmit data.

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