Minimally invasive beekeeping with a Raspberry Pi
Extend Your Feelers
© Lead Image © writerfantast, 123RF.com
Beekeepers can get to know their colonies better without continuously disturbing the industrious insects. Using a Raspberry Pi and various sensors, two hobby beekeepers monitor the temperature and humidity of their hives, with plans to monitor their weight.
The winters in Germany's Sauerland region are long, but above all, changeable. Sometimes it snows in October, and sometimes you experience a spring-like 15°C (59°F) over Christmas. The beekeepers in the area are prepared for this and prepare their bees for the winter in the early autumn after the last honey harvest by feeding several liters of sugar solution into the hives, depending on the size of the bee colony. When the outside temperatures drop, the response is prompt: Lock up, install mouse gratings in front of the entrance, and meet again in April.
Because beekeepers do not normally open the hives during the winter months, they cannot know if the population is thriving. Inspired by the Hiveeyes Project [1] and the Open Hive Monitoring System [2], we planned our own monitoring solution for our colonies. As hobby beekeepers, we first want to observe the temperature (see the "Test Setup" box) but, later, also connect our own hive scale.
Connecting the DHT11 Sensor
The DHT11 digital temperature and humidity sensor is available for a few dollars. It supplies the temperature in degrees Celsius and the relative humidity as a percentage. In the first trial, we connected the sensor directly to the RPi2B. The Python_DHT sensor library [3] helps with the readout. After installing the packages build-essential and python3-dev, we checked out the sensor library from the GitHub repository and installed it on the computer:
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.