3bee Hive-Tech is an innovative IoT system designed for monitoring beehives, which ensures the real time analysis of the main parameters of bees’ life (from air quality to sound spectrum), helping researchers and beekeepers to identify the main causes of bee disappearance and anomalous beehive behaviours. This system allows to predict and to prevent bee death due to environmental and biological factors (pathogens, chemicals pesticides etc…), swarming and bee infertility and supports the bee products traceability. Furthermore, it is completely self-sustainable, powered by solar energy and bee vibrations.

3Bee proposes a sustainable solution in order to:
- Prevent bee diseases;
- Reduce chemical treatments in apiculture;
- Eliminate trauma related to poor beehive management;
- Create the biggest beehive database and proprietary algorithm for fast prediction;
- Merge electronic systems together with biological analysis, to prevent bee illnesses and help beekeepers.

3Bee Hive-Tech comprises electronic sensors and harvester devices that can be installed in a general purpose beehive (i.e. Dadant-Blatt, top-bar, flow-hive), becoming the first self-sustainable electronic beehive powered by sun (energy collected from a solar panel) and bee vibrations (energy harvested from natural bees’ vibration).
In this view, we designed a pervasive electronic monitoring system (3bee Hive-Tech) with a very low environmental impact. The Hive-Tech system empowers a real-time monitoring of the beehive and it helps the beekeeper in the management of the apiary by saving time and reducing costs, whilst it increases the productivity. A single communication gateway (called E-Queen) located in an apiary can gather, aggregate and securely send the data collected up to 10 diagnostic stations (E-Bee) that may be spread around.
The hardware system displays an interactive online dashboard (on the Beekeeper cloud) that allows every logged user to see the information collected and displayed. The dashboard provides meaningful insights based on the readings from the Hive-Tech and the weather patterns. Our solution will improve the knowledge of the bee colony dynamics, allowing the detection of new and smart bio-indicators able to provide an eco-evaluation of the beehive and the bee products. Hive-Tech is intended as the first big data system and service for Bees.
The introduction of 3Bee Hive-Tech will allow a change in the way beehives are managed: now visual inspection of the hive is one of the most important activities in which a beekeeper is engaged. However, a thorough inspection is a time consuming and invasive procedure, which aggravates the honeybees’ status, exposes the inside of the colony to risky external weather conditions and can lead bees to be crushed when the keeper moves frames; it also favours the spread of infections from the inspected hive to the following ones to be checked.