Research
Beehives for Corporations. (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2019, from http://beehiveminded.com/.
- Initially researched the partner, HiveMinded to gain an understanding of what their mission is in Silicon Vally and why they install and maintain beehives on the site of corporations and businesses.
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Pollock, S. (2017, August 24). The buzz about bees. Retrieved from https://paloaltoonline.com /news/2017/08/24/the-buzz-about-bees.
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The Bees in Decline. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://sos-bees.org/causes/.
- Answered questions, Why is this project important? Why do we need to rebuild the beehive population in Silicon Valley?
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A mechanical and open source scale for remote beehive monitoring. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.openhivescale.org/.
- This forum was recommended to us by Phillip Krieg. The Forum describes the importance of using a mechanical scale instead of load cells in a hive scale since a mechanical scale is kore durable over time. The Forum also has blogs and posts by other beekeepers the detail the problems they encountered when trying to build their hive scale. Phil recommended that we use this Forum to answer questions we may have for beekeepers that have used hive scales before since Phil has not.
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Beehive control and observation forum. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php ?t=43707.
-Through Raspberry Pi their are several forums where users can discuss and different use and application sf the raspberry pi including beehive monitoring systems. Users discussed how they had heard of load cells from Wii Balance Boards being used in a hive scale and being able to communicate with the Raspberry Pi.
Measuring the weight of a beehive. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=113534.0.
This Arduino forum proved insight into what other beekeepers have done when building their own hive scales and the struggles they have faced with load cells, creep, and re-taring.
This person had a similar idea to our team on how to address creep of load cells. His first idea mentions using a system to lift the load cells to the base of a load when a measurement tis taken so that the load cells are not under a constant load.
Our team agreed with the point made in this post. It is difficult to find a high quality load cell with low creep that fits within a budget and is relatively cheap, especially when you need four in a Wheatstone Bridge configuration. We however, did not go with a mechanical scale because we thought load cells would be able to communicate an accurate measurement better.
This post confused us because all the research we had conducted showed that creep was a problem when measuring a constant load with load cells. We understand her point but since we want to measure the whole weight of the hive, not just the change in weight we disagree with this post.
We also researched three commercially produced hive scale to understand the different features companies are offering to beekeepers.
A mechanical and open source scale for remote beehive monitoring. (n.d.). Retrieved from. http://www.openhivescale.org/.
Better Knowledge for Bee Health. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.arnia.co.uk/.
Angeles, S. R. L., NewcombPamplin, J., & McAllisterCharlotte, G. (2019, May 9). Beehive scales and monitors. Retrieved from https://solutionbee.com/.
