Weather station

Project description

The weather station is designed to identify and analyze various connections between the weather and the development and health of our bees. Every beekeeper has probably already observed certain connections, but lacks concrete figures or records. The weather and climate sometimes have a direct impact on our bees. However, the connections are also very complex.

For example, every beekeeper has probably already observed that the outside temperature, especially in spring, has a direct impact on the brood activity of the bee colony. If it is very warm, a bee colony can care for more brood, and development progresses much faster.

The weather and climate also affect the vegetation and thus the food supply of our bees. The connections become even more complex with the forest honey flow. Honeydew is produced by Lachnids and Leccania, whose reproduction, in turn, depends on the food supply. These feed on the sap of the trees. These, in turn, require water and therefore sufficient precipitation and soil moisture.

Many beekeepers have certainly observed that particularly strong colonies collapse rapidly in late summer due to the Varroa mite. A strong colony can begin breeding much earlier in the spring than a weaker colony. This also allows the Varroa mite more development cycles and thus faster reproduction. This connection could be studied much more closely using the brood chamber temperature.

The weather also has a significant influence on the effectiveness of Varroa treatment with formic acid. The evaporation of formic acid depends primarily on temperature and humidity. The concentration of formic acid in the colony, and thus its effectiveness, therefore depends primarily on the weather over the entire period of Varroa treatment.

Many questions and observations can be better answered with the help of a weather station. An inexpensive weather station that anyone can assemble and operate should support beekeepers in their work and lead to new insights.

Project progress

The first weather station with a Wi-Fi connection has already been realized. Detailed assembly instructions for the Photon Weather Shield and the Particle Photon microcontroller board can be found here. The weather station is capable of measuring all important weather data (temperature, humidity, air pressure, precipitation, wind direction and speed, and soil moisture) and transmitting it to the cloud.4bees.at data server.

Further goals and improvements

The weather station is currently not being further developed, as it is much easier and more cost-effective to retrieve weather data from a weather service. Weather services such as OpenWeatherMap provide weather data and forecasts for any location. The weather data can be retrieved via a REST API and used in any app or program. This eliminates the need for additional hardware. The only disadvantage is that the data is not as accurate. However, this is negligible for our application.

However, further development could certainly be useful if data not provided by a weather service is to be used for nectar forecasts. A very important parameter for a good nectar forecast would certainly be soil moisture. Soil moisture has a direct influence on the host plants and thus on the reproductive potential of Lachnids and Leccania. Research and investigations into the relationship between soil moisture -> host plant -> Lachnids and Leccania -> honeydew would be very interesting and desirable.