Beehive health IoT application to fight Honey Bee Colony Mortality

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For the past 15 years, European beekeepers have been reporting weakening bee numbers and colony losses. The situation is worsening as according to a recent study of the European Union Reference Laboratory for honeybee health, some countries are losing up to a third of their colonies every year. Honey bees are essential in the pollination of many agricultural crops and concerns have been raised about the ability to maintain the pollination services required to ensure pollinator dependent food production. Nowadays European citizens consider the decline in bee numbers to be the most serious environmental issue – more than climate change. The IoBee consortium wants to disrupt the beekeeping market by reducing colony losses by at least 50%! Through this project, we aim to pilot and commercialise a new Internet of Things (IoT) sensor application that can automatically assess the threat status to a colony. The system will wirelessly transmit results to a cloud server, making field data available for running prediction models, perform risk assessments, issue warnings and make historical analysis using a SDSS- Spatial Decision Support System. This will allow beekeepers to be active participants in colony surveillance programmes with unprecedented accuracy and responsiveness, and as a result, unhealthy or threatened colonies will be remotely detected earlier with greater precision, saving millions of Euros in potential losses. Many systems to monitor beehives already exist in the market. However there are 3 main gaps in the SoA: 1) No solution can i) “fingerprint” individual bees and determine if they are healthy or have a problem (disease, poisoning, etc.), ii) identify bee castes, and iii) identify pest insects that attack hives. 2) No solution offers IoT capability, nor follows standards that could enable establishing the first interoperable surveillance network in Europe. 3) No solution has a SDSS, which is paramount to an advanced EU surveillance system