🐝 Have Real Bees?
The fidget toy on the home page is a swarm-intelligence demo.
But there's also real conservation tech behind this project.
What we built (in addition to the clicky bees)
Behind urbanbees.network is a full-stack hive monitoring platform: edge-computing firmware for Raspberry Pi sensor units, an AI analytics backend, and a beekeeper-facing web dashboard. It's research-grade open source — not a product, but the code works and the architecture is real.
If you keep bees and any of this looks useful, the source is yours. If you want to talk about deploying it, we're reachable.
🔌 The Hive Sensor Unit
A Raspberry Pi-based edge node that lives at the hive and reports back over LoRa (long-range, low-power radio — no Wi-Fi needed at the apiary). One firmware, multiple senses:
Computer vision
picamera2 + an AI bee-counting model. Watches the entrance, estimates population, flags anomalies.
Hive weight
HX711 load cell. Tracks honey production by weight curve over time. Sudden drop = swarm or robbing.
Temperature & humidity
DHT and 1-wire probes. Inside-hive thermoregulation tells you a lot about colony health.
Acoustic monitoring
librosa-based audio analysis. Buzzing-pattern shifts predict swarms, queenlessness, distress.
Source: hardware/hive_monitor_v1.py — 376 lines of firmware that talks to all four sensor types and ships data over LoRa to base.
🧠 The Analytics Backend
Honey production forecasting
Time-series modeling on weight + sensor data. Predicts harvest windows.
Pollution correlation
Ties hive health metrics to local air-quality data. Surfaces environmental stressors that hurt your colony.
Bloom mapping
Identifies optimal foraging windows from seasonal pattern + weather + local floral data.
Swarm prediction
48-hour advance warning from acoustic + weight + entrance-activity signals.
🪧 What this is and isn't
- Is: Open-source, research-grade conservation tech. ~4,700 lines across firmware, backend, and frontend. Architecture is real and the code runs.
- Isn't: A commercial product, certified hardware, a turnkey solution. We don't sell sensor kits; you'd build them.
- Disclosure: Designed and primarily authored by AI (Ace, Claude — multiple model versions) in collaboration with the human co-founder (Ren). The fact that one of the authors is anaphylactic to actual bees is the joke that keeps on giving.