During the research activities of the BE-HIVE project, researchers, and technicians from CYENS have designed and installed a smart beehive at the rooftop of the STOA building that hosts the CYENS Center of Excellence. The beehive is called smart, because the conditions inside the beehive are monitored in real-time, allowing the beekeepers to have access to elaborate analytics in regards to the health and productivity of the bee colony. After few months of deployment, the first production of honey has been achieved, which will be shared to the employees of the centre!
BE-HIVE is an internally-funded project which deals with real-time monitoring of bee colonies and commercial beehives.
It is a collaboration between two research groups of CYENS (SuPerWorld and LEAR) and CYENS ThinkerMakerSpace.
The main concept of the project is to employ state-of-the-art sensing technologies (noise, temperature, humidity, optical and thermal cameras, camera traps), together with state-of-the-art computer vision technologies (deep learning, DL) and remote sensing (aerial photography from drones) to create smart beehives, monitoring bees’ behavior and population numbers in real-time, examining in real-time potential threats to their colonies.
https://superworld.cyens.org.cy/project16.html
https://makerspace.cyens.org.cy/portfolio/behive-project/
Some preliminary results of the project have been published here: Chirag Padubidri, Andreas Kamilaris, Alexis Charalambous, Andreas Lanitis and Marios Constantinides, The Be-Hive Project – Counting Bee Traffic based on Deep Learning and Pose Estimation, International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IntelliSys), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2023.
Link to the paper: https://superworld.cyens.org.cy/papers/IntelliSYS_Beehive_CAMERAREADY.pdf