# Audio, Image, Video, and Weather Datasets for Continuous Electronic Beehive Monitoring
###### Abstract
When we hive new bee packages in late April or early May, we place a small jar of natural raw honey into each new colony as a nutritional supplement at the beginning of the season. No further treatment is applied to honeybee colonies during the beekeeping season. Since our first peer-reviewed publication on the BeePi project in 2016 [3], we have been receiving requests from researchers, practitioners, and citizen scientists for the datasets we have curated for our research. The main objective of this article is to provide a comprehensive point of reference to the datasets we have so far curated and used in our experiments. We hope that our datasets will not only provide benchmarks for continuous EBM, but also help interested parties verify our findings, discover and correct errors, and advance the state of the art in EBM and related areas of AI, machine learning (ML), and data science. BeePi monitors thus far have had seven field deployments. The first deployment was in Logan, Utah (UT), USA (41.7370\({}^{\circ}\) N, 111.8338\({}^{\circ}\) W) in September 2014 when a single BeePi monitor was placed on an empty Langsroth hive for two weeks to test our hardware design and data collection software. The second deployment was in Garland, UT, USA (41.73638\({}^{\circ}\) N, \(-\)112.16292\({}^{\circ}\) W) from December 2014 to January 2015 when a BeePi monitor was placed on a hive with overwintering honeybee colony and successfully collected \(\approx\)200 MB of data. The third deployment was in North Logan, UT (41.7694\({}^{\circ}\) N, 111.8047\({}^{\circ}\) W) from April to November 2016 when four BeePi monitors were placed on four beehives at two apiaries and acquired \(\approx\)20 GB of data. The fourth deployment was in Logan and North Logan, UT (April-September 2017), when four BeePi units were placed into four beehives at two apiaries to collect \(\approx\)220 GB of data. The fifth deployment started in April 2018, when four BeePi monitors were placed on four beehives at an apiary in Logan, UT. In September 2018, we decided to keep the monitors deployed through the winter to stress test our hardware and software in the harsh winter weather conditions of northern Utah. By May 2019, we had collected \(\approx\)400 GB of raw image, video, audio, and temperature data. The sixth field deployment started in May 2019 with four freshly installed Russian bee packages and ended in March 2021 with \(\approx\)350 GB of data collected. Two Russian colonies died in March 2021. The seventh deployment started in late April 2021 with four BeePi monitors: two monitors on the two older Russian colonies that survived and two new Russian colonies lived in late April 2021. During the first four deployments in 2014-2017, we experimented with three types of power supply in BeePi: solar, battery, and grid [14]. A deployed BeePi monitor requires \(\approx\)440 mA to power its pi computer and the three sensors connected to it: the temperature sensor, the microphone, and the pi camera. The hardware clock is powered by its own button-size battery that lasts \(\approx\)1 year. The amount of current drawn by the temperature sensor and the microphone appears to be insignificantly small insomuch as connecting and disconnecting these sensors does not appear to change the measurable amount of drawn current. With the camera unit disconnected, the amount of drawn current fluctuates between \(\approx\)310 mA and \(\approx\)330 mA. Consequently, we estimate the camera to draw \(\approx\)120 mA of 440 mA drawn by a single BeePi monitor. In the solar version of BeePi, a solar panel was placed either on top of or next to a beehive (See Figure 1). For solar harvesting, we experimented with Renogy 50 Watts 12 Volts monocrystalline solar panels, Renogy 10 Amp PWM solar charge controllers, and Renogy 10 ft 10 AWG solar adaptor kits. We also experimented with two rechargeable batteries: the UPG 12 V 12 Ah F2 lead acid AGM deep cycle battery and the Anker Astro E7 26,800 mAh battery.