The big accomplishment during this inspection was putting the second box on each hive and deploying my solar powered Arduino. As you can see in the picture below, my deployment consists of a mesh lined ventilation board that I built. The Arduino Uno sits nicely bridged to a small breadboard that all three DHT-22 temp/humidity sensors are attached to. One sensor sits next to the Arduino, another runs outside the hive to measure ambient temperature and the last one runs down under the Arduino into the brood nest. The other components here are a 2000 mAh LiPo battery, a Sunny Buddy solar charger controller from SparkFun and a 5v boost up converter that takes the 3.7v from the battery and pumps it up to 5.2v that feeds the USB connection to the Arduino. Sitting on top of the Arduino is a data collection shield that has a Real Time Clock and an SD card reader.
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| Arduino Deployment |
I'm really hopeful that the battery/solar combo will actually last more than a few days (unlike the 6 AA battery pack that I tried before). I plan to walk out the the hive this weekend with my laptop and pull the SD card and download the data.
Green and White Hives:
Since both hives seem to have good queens and have used about 80% of the frames, it is time to add the second box. You can really see the evidence of the increase in hive population. Bees are covering most of the frames with very solid frames of brood.
I chose to deal with two issues at once when I added the second boxes. Many of the frames of honey from the hive that died last year were very "wonky". There were large lobes of honey that stuck out so far from the side of the frame that another frame couldn't fit next to it in the proper bee space. So as I added these frames to the new box, I took my uncapping knife and shaved them down flat. I fed a few empty frames in between so it should give the bees a good guide to build straight combs. Plus all that open honey should give plenty of fuel for the bees to build new wax.
The added box was especially helpful to White Hive since that is the hive that has the Honey Super Cell plastic frames in it. Since the bees cannot make drone cells on the fully drawn plastic, they build drone cells on the bottom of the frames. These cells tend to tear open when you do an inspection so you loose some drone larva in the process. The good thing about this is that I did not notice any varroa mites on the open drone larva! That is typically where the mites would be so maybe the mite numbers are really low so far.
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| New boxes going on |
After I added the boxes, I put the Arduino board on top and plugged it into the solar panel. All systems Go!
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| Deployment complete |
Next steps:
As I mentioned, I will be pulling the first week of Arduino data this weekend. After the bees have established themselves in the second box I will be gearing up to do two splits. I really want to increase my genetic diversity this year. I may sacrifice any honey production this year by doing these splits but I'm hoping to actually have a few hives survive the winter this time!
Until next time, thanks for reading!
Sweet arduino setup. I hope the solar power works for you. It'll be interesting to see what data you get. My daughter is just getting into arduino - I'll have to ask her if she's interested in doing something similar for my hives.
ReplyDeleteThanks Robin. It sure was a learning experience! A great way to learn all sorts of skills for design, electronics and soldering!
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