The BeeBox is a essentially a Raspberry Pi computer that we want to put in all of our hives to allow us and our customers to check what’s happening in the hive at any time without having to disturb the bees.

Using Arduino sensors it will monitor specific factors that will help us keep an eye on the colonies health, it’s likelihood of swarming and when to harvest the honey. It will also send alerts when a hive needs to be inspected. We and other beekeepers believe that the less you interfere with a hive the happier and more productive the bees can be. The BeeBox is our digital beekeeper doing the hive inspections with less disruption. The more hives we have recording this kind of data the more useful it will be in correlating colony health with environmental factors and hopefully assist the ongoing investigations into colony collapse disorder.

The BeeBox is currently only at the prototype stage but we’re currently considering various funding options that will enable us develop it further.