Sunday Times 2
Smart bee colony monitoring system
View(s):Bees play a critical role as pollinators, supporting both biodiversity and agriculture in our ecosystem. Beyond sustaining plant life, and enhancing the food chain, they produce honey, a natural product prized for its medicinal properties.
Recognizing the urgent need to protect the bees, Ruk Rakaganno (the Tree Society of Sri Lanka), in collaboration with the University of Colombo recently launched the Smart Bee Colony Monitoring System. 
The Smart Bee Box developed by researchers from the Natural Science Division of the University of Colombo, Tharindu Ranasinghe and Akila Peiris seeks to optimize beekeeping to accommodate the island’s specific environmental and climatic conditions.
The system leverages complex data to monitor the health and productivity of bee colonies in real time. It tracks critical parameters once in every two seconds and updates to the cloud once every two minutes, information such as temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, weight, and bee activity, both inside and outside the Bee Box to provide an efficient, remote solution, for analysis, with a view to manage the bee colony effectively.
This initiative represents a significant step forward in using advanced technology in ecological conservation. Though initially developed for research purposes by a batch of students from the University of Moratuwa, the system’s further development will be guided by identifying the patterns and developing models to predict and monitor bee colony performance which will benefit Sri Lankan apiculture in the long run.
The project, funded by Deutsche Bank, was officially installed for field trials on October 3 at the Popham Arboretum in Dambulla. Now owned and managed by the National Institute of Fundamental Studies, the Arboretum was previously managed by Ruk Rakaganno for 15 years.