📡 IoT Smart Hive Monitoring and Equipment Asset Tracking

About this simulation

Modern apiaries increasingly run on small battery-powered sensor nodes rather than the beekeeper's hand alone. A load cell under each hive reports weight continuously, a probe near the brood nest reports internal temperature and humidity, and a low-power radio pushes readings to a gateway that relays them to the cloud. Separately, cheap Bluetooth Low Energy tags stuck to smokers, extractors and other gear let a phone or fixed gateway estimate roughly where each item last was — useful across multi-site outfits where equipment routinely goes missing.

How it works

• Hive weight — accumulates over time from the nectar flow trend, the same signal beekeepers use to detect a nectar flow starting, a swarm leaving, or a colony starving.
• Internal temperature — bees actively thermoregulate the brood nest near 35°C; the colony fans harder (visualised as a spinning vent) as ambient heat rises, and clusters tighter in the cold.
• Beacon scan range — the translucent dome is the gateway's Bluetooth reception radius. Equipment tags inside it report as connected (green); tags outside it go dark (red), which is exactly how "lost equipment" alerts get triggered in the field.
• Locate equipment — draws a direct pulse line from the gateway to the selected asset and reports straight-line distance, mimicking a "find my gear" beacon search.

Controls

• Hives online — number of sensor-equipped hives in the row (2–6).
• Nectar flow trend — kilograms gained or lost per day, driving the live weight readout.
• Ambient temperature — outside air temperature, which drives hive fanning/clustering and colour-coded thermal halos.
• Beacon scan range — the gateway's Bluetooth pickup radius in metres.
• Locate equipment — pick an asset to trace and measure from the gateway. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

A single hive can lose 2–3kg overnight during a strong nectar flow and gain it back the next day as bees ripen and cap honey — which is why remote hive scales are one of the most widely adopted IoT sensors in commercial beekeeping, well ahead of more exotic options like acoustic or vibration monitoring.