# An Internet of Things-Based Low-Power Integrated Beekeeping Safety and Conditions Monitoring System
## 5 Conclusions  
This paper presents a new beehive IoT management system called IBSMC. The IBSMC system is capable of monitoring beehive array conditions and offers safety and management of apiary procedures, using efficient information technologies and low power communication protocols, sensors and actuators. The proposed system's contribution to the apiary industry is its low power communication model, the efficient monitoring and attempt to adapt the environmental conditions, and the safety of beekeeping hives. The proposed IBSMC system is an effort to combine the most promising enhanced existing beehive monitoring systems capabilities with new ideas of environmental control technologies,  
Figure 7: **(a)** Peltier Actuator Thermal difference achieved inside the beehive over Energy consumption at 36 \({}^{\circ}\)C of external environmental temperature. **(b)** Thermopad actuator Thermal difference achieved inside the beehive over Energy consumption at 0 \({}^{\circ}\)C of external environmental temperature. such as the proposed temperature and humidity comfort systems (ambient conditions regulation sub-systems), the smart RF low-power sensors security mechanism, as well as the incorporation of LoRaWAN technology for long-range data transmission and low energy consumption, especially for migration apiaries. For beehive array safety, the IBSMC system offers: 1. Environmental conditions monitoring, involving micro-climate extreme environmental incidents: the IBSMC system can offer temperature and humidity measurements inside and outside each beehive equipped with conditions monitoring sensors. The system also provides reporting of humidity and temperature trends, outages and alerts, of 20-30 daily readings. Furthermore, external interfacing of IBSMC with Wunderground meteorological stations offers micro-climate predictions feedback. 2. Beehive Theft differentiation and prevention using low power sensors placed on each beehive to alert on theft incidents, and 3. Animal attacks identification for each beehive cell, with a maximum alert time of 1 min from the first event. Regarding beehive array conditions monitoring and regulation, the IBSMC system is unique amongst existing ones since it offers, apart from conditions monitoring and triggering of alerts, the ability to dynamically manipulate beehive temperature and humidity extremes via its actuator subsystems. The energy footprint used by these systems has also been selected to be of small energy consumption, as shown in experimental scenario II, and it presents significant temperature results of low energy footprint on both low and high environmental temperatures. Cross-comparison between existing GPS/GPRS-capable systems and proposed IBSMC showed that the proposed system is superior due to its zero cost on Telecom services/year for the apiarist, since the LoRaWAN infrastructure is an 868 MHz and 433 MHz RF infrastructure operating in the ISM band. Moreover, low energy transceivers are offering 2.5 times more useful back-to-back payload data transmissions (without protocol overhead) on the same battery energy reserve. This can be measured either in payload Bytes/mAh for periodic data transmissions with at least 1 min of sleep period interval after each successful data transmission, also maintaining the 1% LoRaWAN duty cycle restriction per node on the ISM band. The IBSMC system is also capable of remote downlink control to its actuators with downlink control messages per day per beehive array to arrays' central beehive cells. As future work, the author suggests extensive apiary experimentation for the accurate calibration of the system's actuators towards the environmental conditions in Greece and the development of a model for the detection of beehive population changes and diseases. Furthermore, performance evaluation in terms of scalability and business exploitation of the proposed system is also on-going work, funded by the PoC (Proof of Concept contest) from the Scientific park of the University of Patras, Greece.