Bee colony remote monitoring based on IoT using ESP-NOW protocol

Information and communication technologies, specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), have been widely used in many agricultural practices, including beekeeping, where the adoption of advanced technologies has an increasing trend. Implementation of precision apiculture methods into beekeeping practice depends on availability and cost-effectiveness of honey bee colony monitoring systems. This study presents a developed bee colony monitoring system based on the IoT concept and using ESP8266 and ESP32 microchips. The monitoring system uses the ESP-NOW protocol for data exchange within the apiary and a GSM (Global System for Mobile communication)/GPRS (General packet radio service) external interface for packet-based communication with a remote server on the Internet. The local sensor network was constructed in a star type logical topology with one central node. The use of ESP-NOW protocol as a communication technology added an advantage of longer communication distance between measurement nodes in comparison to a previously used Wi-Fi based approach and faster data exchange. Within the study, five monitoring devices were used for real-time bee colony monitoring in Latvia. The bee colony monitoring took place from 01.06.2022 till 31.08.2022. Within this study, the distance between ESP-NOW enabled devices and power consumption of the monitoring and main nodes were evaluated as well. As a result, it was concluded that the ESP-NOW protocol is well suited for the IoT solution development for honeybee colony monitoring. It reduces the time needed to transmit data between nodes (over a large enough distance), therefore ensuring that the measurement nodes operate in an even lower power consumption mode.