Design and implementation of a smart beehive and its monitoring system using microservices in the context of IoT and open data

Abstract

It is essential to keep honey bees healthy for providing a sustainable ecological balance. One way of keeping honey bees healthy is to be able to monitor and control the general conditions in a beehive and also outside of a beehive. Monitoring systems offer an effective way of accessing, visualizing, sharing, and managing data that is gathered from performed agricultural and livestock activities for domain stakeholders. Such systems have recently been implemented based on wireless sensor networks (WSN) and IoT to monitor the activities of honey bees in beehives as well. Scholars have shown considerable interests in proposing IoT- and WSN-based beehive monitoring systems, but much of the research up to now lacks in proposing appropriate architecture for open data driven beehive monitoring systems. Developing a robust monitoring system based on a contemporary software architecture such as microservices can be of great help to be able to control the activities of honey bees and more importantly to be able to keep them healthy in beehives. This research sets out to design and implementation of a sustainable WSN-based beehive monitoring platform using a microservice architecture. We pointed out that by adopting microservices one can deal with long-standing problems with heterogeneity, interoperability, scalability, agility, reliability, maintainability issues, and in turn achieve sustainable WSN-based beehive monitoring systems.