Australian beekeeper building a smart hive monitor (and a varroa card game)

Hi all — Gergo here, from Melbourne, Australia.

Just a quick intro

I've built a smart hive monitor of my own: temperature, humidity and pressure sensors, a load-cell weight platform, RGB + thermal cameras, and an on-device edge-compute pipeline I'm still training up to do more with that footage over time. Running a dual-queen setup too. All the electronics and enclosure are built and ready — planning to get it onto a real hive this spring. Genuinely keen for input from you, especially on anything I've missed.

Separately — I also made a card game. A co-op survival game about beekeepers working together to keep every colony alive through a varroa outbreak, illustrated with real vintage specimen art. Thought it'd make a decent family/educational gift, might be a nice change of pace from screens. Landing on Kickstarter soon — sign up for the heads-up here if you're curious: https://2bee.farm/broodnest

Keen to hear what you're all seeing this season.

Dual queens? How does that work?

It can be done with 2 nucs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VIdA8ZZMH8)
I put a "nuc divider" on the 10 frame brood box between the 5-5 frame part, push the entrance to the sides.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Two-queen-system-of-honey-bee-colony-management-Moeller/6b2b93dc31e0240cc93bf309a8a70576f1881550

That's an interesting concept.

Here is Michael Bush's article on a two queen hive.

Short version, he does not recommended it for beginners. If I ever manage to intice a swarm into a box, I hope to build up and try this out.

I'm still having trouble understanding how this would do much to control varroa mites. Sure, there would be few brood at first but it seems like that would increase quickly.

It also seems that since bees respond & act mostly due to queen pheromones two queens would confuse both sets of workers.

Bees are so fascinating. The more one learns about them the more they realize how little we humans know.