## 3 Technological Advancements in Bee-Based Biosensors/Biomonitors
### Electronic Hives, Bee Counters, Chemical Monitoring at the Hive
One example is the Raspberry Pi(r) introduced in 2011 [90]. This is a credit-card sized, Acorn RISC Machine (ARM)-based computer running under GNU/Linux. The first of these small processors to be employed for bee-related monitoring and sensing was introduced at the Vermont Hive Monitoring Workshop. Other recently available small processors that are being used in hive monitoring and sensing equipment include: Arduino(r), Make(r), Sparkfun(r) (Niwot, CO, USA), and Adafruit(r) (New York, NY, USA). Arnia [89], based in the UK, provides individual hive-monitoring systems with cellular communications that are comparable to our pallet-based systems with satellite communications. Founded in 2009, Arnia currently sells their systems in 14 countries. Arnia's hive systems are distinguished by ready access to hive data via any Internet-enabled device in any web browser (Figure 8) for relatively low-cost, hive-based data acquisition from individual hives. Arnia's focus is on backyard beekeepers, students, and other small-scale or networked research projects. Arnia's systems offer small size, light weight, several sensor options, and established web-based reporting [89]. Their systems are much more mature than most of those offered by more recent entries into the field. Arnia recently supported an experiment involving 75 colonies and reported to us that their graphic user interface worked well, easily and intuitively monitoring different sensors from different hives at different sites. They concluded that it should serve commercial beekeepers with up to eight hives per site, but agree with us that there may be a need for a different approach to very large-scale beekeeping operations or large-scale studies comparing data from hundreds to thousands of hives. Large commercial beekeeping operations, intensive research projects, and critical applications such as those of the military may require more than simple hive sensor information. Ruggedness, reliability, low maintenance, solar power, and satellite communications are critical issues. These users need an overall management system that combines hive-based measurements, such as from an Arnia kit, our own pallet-based SmartHive(r) systems, or those of other suppliers, integrated with technologies such as acoustic scanning for pests, diseases, and pesticide exposure warnings, with infrared scanning to assess colony size and condition and bar codes or RFID tags for asset tracking and inventory control to help them with everything that they do. All of these issues, plus multi-variate data analysis, data visualizations, and advanced data processing tools such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) that can recognize patterns in large data sets, are areas of expertise that our team has been addressing since 1995. The 50 colonies that we placed online in 1995 and ran for five years quickly demonstrated to us a pressing need for data integration and display. We also learned which sensors were most useful, which were disruptive to bees, and which were problematic in terms of long-term performance. We have 20 years of practical, field-based experience working with electronics and distance communications systems for the monitoring of bees and bee colonies. Arnia has six years of similar research and development and implementation experience. Together we represent nearly 26 years of accumulated field experience with hive monitoring. Figure 8: Arnia’s Remote Hive Monitoring web-based reporting system [89]. The interface is intuitive and works well for beekeepers.