Australian beekeeper building a smart hive monitor (and a varroa card game)

Introductions
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1

Hi all — Gergo here, from Melbourne, Australia.

I’ve built a smart hive monitor of my own: temperature, humidity and pressure sensors, a load-cell weight platform, RGB + thermal cameras, and an on-device edge-compute pipeline I’m still training up to do more with that footage over time. Running a dual-queen setup too. All the electronics and enclosure are built and ready — planning to get it onto a real hive this spring. Genuinely keen for input from you, especially on anything I’ve missed.
Separately — I also made a card game. A co-op survival game about beekeepers working together to keep every colony alive through a varroa outbreak, illustrated with real vintage specimen art. Thought it’d make a decent family/educational gift, might be a nice change of pace from screens. Landing on Kickstarter soon — sign up for the heads-up here if you’re curious: 2bee Broodnest: The Card Game | 2bee.farm

Keen to hear what you’re all seeing this season. :honeybee:

2

The edge-compute bit is what caught my eye. Are you running inference on-device (Pi/Jetson?), or capturing and processing off the hive later? And is the thermal aimed at varroa, or more cluster/brood temp?

I’m software, not hardware (building a beekeeping logbook app), so I’m mostly here to nerd out over the pipeline :-). Good luck getting it on a hive this spring.

3

It depends on the battery budget (solar/plugged in), network capability (sat/home wifi). Images captured and can be processed on site (Radxa CM4 per apiary), If wifi available and no edge (for cost saving) it sends the data to the cloud, If not available images processed in the edge, later transferred via mobile.

A hive is having optional dual queen setup so having 2x(humidity/pressure/temp) in the brood box, weight sensor, 1x(humidity/pressure/temp) per super, RGB and thermal camera at the entrance.

The project it includes firmware, frontend (web, mobile), backend, ML, CAD (CNC), PCB design.

And for fun, I have created a physical card game :slight_smile: https://2bee.farm/broodnest for joung beekeepers , families and a digital one for kids :slight_smile: 2bee.farm