Terry, Thanks for the gracious offer and help with our project. The internal hive environment is.. well.. probably not ideal for electronics. There's decent humidity as they cure the new nector to honey, and any small gaps (6mm or less usually) bees seal with propolis, a resinous material. They also seal up any larger gaps with wax. Space clearances around the frames and between frames and the walls is pretty small as well so it's very cramped inside. Water can in theory get in, but the hive we're studying will be protected under the roof of a small shelter, it sits on a scale and that needs protected from the rain.
After discussing it with my professor the largest he'd ever go with this hive is two large super boxes, and several smaller boxes for collecting honey. (a queen excluder is placed between the brood supers and honey super so she can't get in there to lay eggs, so the workers only store honey up there.) So 1 arduino is probably good. By recording the ID of each sensor on the frames before hand, then we can with paperwork keep track of where a frame was in the boxes at any time and where it gets moved too. So as long as the CSV file logs the ID of the frame, probably ID of first sensor, then we can organize things.
Clemens, yea I've looked at HOBOS, they seem to be getting FAR more funding then we could ever hope, one of their cameras is probably more than we can hope, lol. We've been collecting weight data for two years now using an
Adam Equipment GFK 660A digital scale, they offer a software package that you can log the weight into a CSV file at specified intervals. Doubt theres any easy way to make an arduino interface it, it uses a serial connection, but yea. We're fine with keeping that setup for the weight, we just have a serial cable ran to the house from the hive, and a power line ran to the hive for the scale. So power isn't an issue at the hive site.
GoForSmoke, It may be possible. The temp sensors are not cheap and in bulk it's still going to be a lot of dollars for the sensors alone, that combined with finding someone to design the circuits, the circuit boards, cost of getting boards made, and the other equipment, we may not have much money for exploring alternative designs. We're basing our design off of another experiment (http://mietz.imkerforum.de/) so we're not going in blind on design, but alternative ideas would be helpful. The bees generally don't build hive out to the edges of the frame, so putting sensors on the edges would generally be a waste, and they generally start putting brood cells in the center of a frame, so biasing our measurements toward the center seems to make sense.
Do you have suggestions?