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In Malaysia, small and medium enterprises (SME) have sprung up over the past years that are vying to cultivate stingless bee for honey. Farmers will extract the honey from the combs manually by using a small and long plastic tube hosed into a portable battery powered suction pump. Current harvesting system was performed by collecting the honey from the combs and at irregular intervals in time. This is because the farmers usually do not exactly know the systematic way to estimate the amount of honey produced. In respect of sustainable development, stingless bees are good pollinators for agricultural crops such as starfruit, guava, citrus, mango, watermelon, durian, and coconut. The value of insect pollination service of these crops was estimated in millions.
Availability of plants, flowers characteristics, forager activity time, and environmental factors influence the honey production of stingless bees. Therefore, an intensive study of the impact of climate on the activities of a stingless honey bee in a significant time period that spans at least one season cycle is important for future plan to mediate between the sustainability of honey bee production and the environment. Manual collection of data for chosen factors can be sporadic and produce variations from incorrect measurement taking; this can cause complications in producing any important interpretation. However, the feasibility of online monitoring of beehive based on IoT application, its limitation, and performance are not explored well.
The ubiquity of advanced Wireless Sensor Network and information technologies has been a key enabler networking everyday objects. Collective physical items in a system equipped with “Internet of Things (IoT)” can communicate with each other while integrating the physical world with a computer-based system in a more direct way, and greatly improve resources efficiency in addition to alleviate human intervention. If the information of the environment is being collected on the platform of IoT, there are several advantages: can reduce effort and time required for monitoring a particular environment, the logging of data allows for reduced likelihood of data being misplaced or lost, and sensor nodes could be placed in critical spots without the need to put personnel in perilous situations.
In this project, we focus on understanding the impact of climate on stingless bee activities using IoT applications based on FAVORIOT platform. We also aimed to present the theory to describe the behavior of the stingless bee and combine it with the population size, and the number of honey productions, the theory will enable the estimation of honey production with bee health estimation models. Furthermore, all determined climate parameters, activities rates, population size, and honey productions values will be a set of reference to determine the heath level of the stingless honey bee population.
[NOTE: This project is being done by UTM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator]
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