Combine engineering, the internet and an age-old practice such as beekeeping, and the result is Melixa, the first hi-tech beehive that monitors the health of bees and the quality of their production.

How Melixa works

Built by a Trentino-based startup, incubated by the business accelerator Industrio Ventures and supported by the Fondazione Edmund Mach and the European Union through the ERDF call for rural development, via Trentino Sviluppo and the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, the beehive is fitted with a sensor package that constantly monitors the population inside the apiary.

Discover Bee my Future, the project for the protection of bees

Analysing the health of bees and their environment

The underlying idea is to provide a series of data that would otherwise be difficult to measure, such as the weight of the hive, the number of bees entering and leaving over a given period of time, internal and external temperatures, and the amount of rainfall. "Thanks to these data we are able to monitor the health of the insects — in other words, we have a bee biology monitoring system," explains Andrea Rosani, engineer and member of the Melixa team. "Indirectly, we try to understand the state of the environment in which the pollinators live." Insects are, in fact, excellent biological indicators of the health of the ecosystem in which they live. Wax, propolis and honey can provide important information about the quality of the environment in which the bee operates.

The system developed by the startup is based on hardware comprising a sensor package capable of counting bees, a set of scales, temperature sensors and a rain sensor, all connected via GPS and wirelessly to the main server managed by the company itself. The entire system is also powered by two photovoltaic panels, making the hive independent of the electricity grid.

A system for all beekeepers

The data collected in this way can be consulted remotely via an application, allowing the beekeeper to know the state of the hive in real time and to act promptly if needed. The entire system, which can be fitted to any hive, is designed to be used by hobbyists, professional beekeepers or the research community, specifically to monitor one of the insects that has been suffering most in recent years and that is indirectly responsible for a third of food production.

Melixa at Expo 2015

The hive was also present at Expo 2015, inside the Italy Pavilion, representing the Trentino Region, as one of the best startups linked to the themes of sustainability and food. "The purchase cost," Rosani notes, "is recouped by a hobbyist in around five years, and by a professional in under a year."