Design of monitoring and counting system for bee colony based on ultralow-power consumption MCU and photoelectric sensor

Abstract: With the development of the science and technology of modern agriculture, facility agriculture gets increasingly popular. Strawberry produced in facilities such as high tunnel is one of the key components for Chinese agriculture in some regions because of high economic return.. Because the flowering period of facilities strawberry is in winter, there is a high humidity in greenhouse, the mobility of air is limited, and the most important is lack of medium for strawberry pollination. Therefore, in the winter facilities strawberry, Apis cerana pollination is necessary for the improvement of the production and quality of strawberry. However, the lack of the specific counting system to monitor the activities and efficiencies of pollinating bees in facilities strawberry needs to be addressed. Here, a novel set of monitoring and counting system for honeybee colonies vitality was designed by using the photoelectric sensors (H42B6) and wireless serial ports, and successfully applied in the facilities strawberry. The system was composed of a low consumption single chip microcomputer of MSP430G2553 as the control core, and double infrared photoelectric sensors as the bees counting components. The control core cpu worked at the voltage of 1.8V to 3.6V and it has five low consumption modes (LPM0, LPM1, LPM2, LPM3, LPM4) and the working current was also low. When the cpu worked at the clock frequency of 1Mhz, the chip working current was only around 200 μA to 400 μA, which made the whole system work at the advantage of low power. As a sensor module, double photoelectric consisted of an enter/close for bees in and out, and because the number of bees were large, the system had the same two enter/closes to avoid bees' congestion around the hives. According to the diode performance characteristic, when bees got in or out of the hives, the double infrared photoelectric sensors recorded the counting signals, which triggered the MCU's external interrupt. Then MCU dealt with the received signals from the infrared photoelectric sensors to display the bees' real time access number on LCD12864, as well as transmit the corresponding data to the computer through the wireless serial port device. The whole data were respectively sum of the number of bees in and out from two enter/closes?hives. The field test proved that the performance of the whole system was well and the power consumption was low. There was voltage chip TPS7333 in the system circuit, which can supply stability voltage (3.3 V) to the system. So, the power supply of the system is quite convenient for the alternative 220V alternating current and the general portable power source (5 V). The field test results showed that this monitoring system can not only count bees in and out of hives, but also reflect the bees' activity pattern. It is suitable to monitor and count the dynamic activity of the pollination bees in the facilities strawberry.