BBeacon

Bees are amazing creatures; all their activities have great value for the environment and also bring enormous benefits for us human beings. Recently, bees are disappearing from earth in a rapid rate, which is known as the Colony Collapse Disorder. Clear reasons have not been found yet, but pesticide could be one of the possible culprits. The decrease of bees is a bad sign for living beings because bees pollinate most of the crops that are being eaten. As Albert Einstein once quoted: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live”.

There are several ideas and initiatives but none of them really turned out to be a product ready to sell. One of the already existing products is a smart hive with all kinds of sensors while BBeacon is an addition to work with any hive.

BBeacon aims to raise the people’s awareness of the functions and importances of bees and offer new possibilities of having bees in the urban city areas. Therefore two products have been developed: BBeacon Hive and BBeacon Flower, that envision an “internet of bees” product & service system combining Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and beekeeping in the urban city areas. BBeacon Hive is a sensor developed for the professional beekeepers that can be integrated in the beehive. This kit, which is an addition to the hive, is able to measure weight, humidity and temperature inside the hives. Combined with an online application, beekeepers are offered a smarter way of tracking the data and parameters that are crucial for beekeeping. BBeacon Flower is an artificial flower containing the integrated sensors and “bee attractor” (i.e. sugar water) meant to spread over the city in citizens’ gardens. Bees will be attracted to pollinate the garden , the amount of bees will be counted and can be sent to local IoT servers to have a representation of the eco-friendliness of a specific area. People with the artificial flowers in their gardens can view the data of their gardens and different cities through a phone app. Profiles of the beekeepers are shown as well, to create connections between citizens and beekeepers. Finally, government officials could use this information to make comparisons among different regions and cities and use this references in making plans to develop the urban city environment.