Our 2 OpenGreens rooftop gardens host 10 beehives. In summer, the 2 gardens are the home of aproximately 500.000 city honeybees. The Bee Monitoring project transforms the 2 rooftop gardens, which are located at about half a kilometer distance from each other, into communicating vessels and are the start of a green corridor in the city.
The hives in each of the gardens are populated with Apis mellifera carnica. Honeybees are a good bio-indicators. Biological indicators are species that are used to monitor the health of their ecosystem.
They can tell us about the cumulative effects of different pollutants in the ecosystem. Therefore we study the honeybees : their behaviour, their distributed intelligence, their ecology and sociobiology.
By monitoring the bees and beehives with all kinds of sensors, we also study the colony as a community. Examinating the honeybee colony and its inner-workings also allows for an excellent introduction into non-biological subject areas, such as sociology, philosophy, engineering.
We document our research with all kind of media and we use the extracted data & information to make artworks based upon the bees’ behaviour over time. In this section we will handle all information related to bio-technology and honey bees.
All the sensors are connected to an arduino board, which is connected to the internet.
With this set up I can follow at any time the warming up and cooling down in the hive. Temperature and humidity inside and outside the hive are important indicators of hive health.
Some worker bees … (read more…)
The life in and around the hive is monitored by many measurement systems. Two webcams , equipped with infrared leds, make it possible to see in the … (read more…)