The Hivemind Hub is an important tool for optimising returns on your apiary investment.
Here’s a simple outline of how it works.
A satellite connected “hub” communicates wirelessly with scales under your hives and reports back to a web server 4 times a day the weight so we can observe the changes.
You can determine:
- Honey brought in or consumed on a daily and weekly basis.
- Weight of foraging bees.
- The optimum time to rob your hives.
- The productivity difference between hives.
- Exactly when a flow has finished and it’s time to move
There is nothing more satisfying than watching the honey come in from afar.
The number of kms we do to check our hives is both time consuming and expensive but not redundant when a monitoring system is in place.
When you consider the amount of money we spend on IT for our family, home and office the Satellite hub is just communication equipment for our remote office.
Paired with just one scale and you have real time data from the apiary.
It’s a minor capital expense that’s written off in one year. Then after that it’s $48/month for the data.
However if we are visiting our apiary anyway every couple of weeks do we really need it?
What is the cost of visiting our bees just to figure out if we’re getting a good shake?
For the long term cost of $50 a month we can log in from home or on a phone to know what our bees are doing.
Couple this with the potential to share measurable data with others in a trusted peer network and you have a genuine productivity tool.
Behind Hivemind, are a team of engineers who will ensure the product grows with your needs.
Below are snapshots of my experience in 2016-17
The graphs below show Show results on Jarrah and Wandoo flows.
The use of this data has allows us to optimise our time management and collect supers before they get too full.
Overall using this equipment is makes us more efficient bee keepers.
If you would like to talk about my experiences and ask more questions came me on 0401533336.
Pricing is here.
This is a screenshot of the calculator offered at http://hivemind.co.nz/yield that you can use to hypothesise on how such a tool could help you with your timing and time use.
