grahamluckhurst
New Bee
Hi all,
I'm looking to choose a hive monitoring system. There are quite a few out there, some with weight only, and some with sensors inside.
Of course, when reading on the webpages of the different suppliers, everyone seems to have the best system.
But nothing is better than user experience, so; Are there anyone here who is currently using a system like
Arnia
Beehivemonitoring
IO Bee
Or any other system?
I do not need a giant system, I have remote apiaries that I would like to monitor. One with 3 hives, and the other with 4 hives.
They are a few hours drive from home, and it is a corporate customer. Oh and no; We will still be visiting the apiary each week, but, I would sleep better if I knew that I had some sort of monitoring of the cubes.
Hostabee monitoring
I bought this from Thornes last year, not cheap. I had problems not the usual setting up problems I was excepting, there was no setting up it just worked. HOWEVER do check your hive is in a location that the strange radio signal it uses will reach your hive, both Thornes and the Hostabee website have a link to a coverage map showing signal coverage. It would work from home, Thornes called me check I new what I was doing, nice service. But it worked at the Apiary, as you can see from the image below, but not when I put it in a hive. The long straight lines are from when the monitor was in the hive and I tried it in two.
As you can see it took me until March to fix it. Hostabee sell a Repeater (amplifier). After several attempt to by one (I had to use the French language side of the site) I managed to order one over Christmas, unfortunately Hostabee knew nothing of Brexit and the package was returned to them. In March it arrived with just two instructions to place the repeater at about 2m above the ground no more the 30m from the hive.
,
It worked straightaway and still does.
It also measures humidity. I am not convinced this is useful?