Hi Aaron,
It was nice talking to you earlier regarding options for collaboration. We have a small but growing office apiary here in the centre of Canberra, and this should be a good site for what we are looking to achieve. We have two hives, a 10-frame Langstroth that has been established for just under a year, and a Warre hive that has just received a large swarm.
The Warre that you can see in the picture above at the apiary, is only a place-holder, we have a three box Warre hive that is being painted by an indigenous artist at the moment as a reconciliation initiative (unpainted hive in the photo attached), so this should look quite spectacular once it is finished. It is an observation hive, to make regular inspection easier.
There are two hives on the site at the moment, and two options for us to discuss:
Option 1: I can put together a quilt box that fits the 10-frame Langstroth, and this can house the audio sensor, providing easy access to swap over batteries and storage cards. We have a large file transfer service that we can set you up as a receiver, and dump data to you this way. Because we are an engineering design firm, we have good bandwidth, so we can move a fair bit of data.
Option 2: We can install one of your alpha kits into one or both hives, and stream data back to you via our office wi-fi. This could be a good way to calibrate the alpha kits, particularly for audio. In terms of getting a swarm, the Langstroth is the most likely candidate, so this should probably be the focus.
If you can send us the gear that you want to install (send to Level 1, 15 Barry Drive Turner ACT 2612) then we can take care of the rest – I have already lined up our IT people so that we can link to the office wi-fi, and for the audio sampling we can go out and swap batteries/cards twice weekly so that we get a full dataset.
As discussed, we will make sure that the time and date of data capture is logged, as well as any notable events with the hives (swarming, inspections, harvests etc).
We regularly blog about the hive to give updates through the company (http://aurecongroup.com/en/blogs/latest-posts.aspx), and there has been a lot of interest – if you could acknowledge our involvement on your site that would be awesome. We have even had our executives play with the bees, so it has been a good showcase for beekeeping.
In terms of keeping everything (data etc) open source that is totally fine with us – this is fun for us, not our main focus, so we are not interested in hanging onto licencing for any of this. We really like what you are trying to achieve, and want to help you out in any way that we can. We have people with electronics experience as well as some high level acoustic monitoring engineers if you need them.
PS – our security group specialise in video, so we are looking to work with a company to add a video feed of the hive entrance at some stage.
