Stingless bees are found throughout the tropics and subtropics of the world between 30 degrees north and south. These bees are known for their harmless stings which are useless as weapons.
Honey from these bees has been used as medicine to cure varieties of ailments since a very long time ago. There are numerous uses and benefits of honey that have been documented for the treatment of eye infections, open wounds, wounds, diabetes and hypertension, and other diseases as reported in several studies.
The stingless bee farming industry in Malaysia has been gaining popularity in recent years. The number of bee farmers has increased dramatically over the years, and on the record, there are more than 1000 registered farmers nationwide in the last 5 years.
The honey bee industry is a very profitable industry and in 2013 alone Malaysia imported more than RM50 million worth of honey products and the number is in increasing trend.
Precision apiculture allows the beekeeper to manage their beehives for many possible reasons, including research, daily management of bee information without being intrusive by caregivers, and learning how to reduce resources and time without reducing production.
Recently, automatic monitoring systems have grown rapidly due to the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs consist of embedded devices that can obtain data from different sensors, process it, and communicate with a computer or through a cloud database. These devices are known as nodes or motes and are the core of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Humans have used WSN in many activities of daily life, such as agriculture.
WSN also began to be used to monitor stingless bee colonies. WSN nodes can be used to access data from sensors and monitor the environmental conditions of the beehive (temperature, humidity, CO2, etc.) and even its weight [8]. Nodes communicate through a gateway and transmit data from the motes to the database for storage and processing.
This has improved the features of the monitoring system, leading to what is now known as precision apiculture.
Based on UniMAP’s research findings, the influence of temperature and humidity on the health of Stingless beehives and colonies is very significant but the effect of air quality in this study is still in search.
Further features on the experiment setup and longer data collection are needed to
strengthen the results of this study. This paper has presented the design, development, and test of a real-time time air pollutants measurement and monitoring system capable of determining the level of health of stingless beehives in mix crop-livestock farms.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research has been carried out under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) research grant by the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia (MOHE) under a grant number of 9003-00743 with research collaboration with Bayu Gagah (M) Sdn. Bhd .
