HIVEMON, AI and Me

Imkerliches / Beekeeping
1

Hello everyone,

My name is Octavian (Tavi), and I’m a beekeeper.

I want to develop an IoT system that can help me look after my bees and understand them better.

A long time ago, I started building a hive scale that can send data for real-time monitoring. It is working well and has been deployed in the field for some time now, I am building more units.

I also built a weather station (as everybody seems to be doing these days), based on an ESP32 and a BME280 sensor. It has also been deployed in the field for some time and is sending data successfully. I now need to expand the station by adding more sensors.

I also plan to build a small sensor that will be placed inside the hive to collect and send temperature, humidity, and sound data.

There is also another system that my child is working on, called “Varroa AI” — a system for detecting Varroa mites on bees at the hive entrance. There is still a lot of work to do on that as well.

These systems are, or will be, sending data to a local server running InfluxDB and Grafana (without MQTT, at least for now).

But these are just sensors collecting and sending data, and I need more than that. I want to understand why bees behave the way they do, beyond just observing variations in a few parameters. I want to relate this data to the knowledge found in books. So, of course, I built a wiki with Claude AI. This is a completely new rabbit hole for me. It will also store the notes I take when visiting and reviewing the hives, since I always seem to lose them.

So, to get to the point: HIVEMON sensors, weather data, review notes, and knowledge from books will surely help me a lot—for example, with a bee calendar adapted to my region, Varroa tracking, and treatments. This system will grow better as I add more data to it.

The best thing I can think of about this system is that I will be able to pass this knowledge on easily to my children. The wiki is just text files, and the sensor data is easy to store as well. I’m not young anymore, and I forget things.

That’s it. This is what I have in mind. It is a lot, probably too ambitious. Everyone knows that AI is only as good as the information you feed into it, and I’m working on that.

Again, this is not a very technical post, but I just wanted to share my project and thoughts. I think the subject is relevant to this forum.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you, and best wishes,

Tavi

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Love your tinkering. Just a quick heads up: if you ever need a beekeeping app that supports agents, I recently opened up an API in my own app for agent usage. Might be interesting for you, though it looks like you enjoy self-hosting, so no pressure at all.

Example how I work with my bot and the app:

image
image1568×1126 112 KB

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Thank you Hannes, I will take a look.

Currently I’m building my local Wiki with local flora data, bees deseases data, and my hives set-up. Basically to get a calendar like you show in the pic. It is working very well. I will post some updates here. The wiki is not yet connected to the weather station and HIVEMOn scale at the moment so it just reports calendar todo’s based on the books it ingested.

In the next days i’ll connect it to the sensors, I’m curious to see it adapt to th reality.

I appreciate your interest,

Thank you and best wishes,

Tavi

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