SMART BEE

Smart Bee. Do Less Make More

Inspiration Saida a Bee farmer in Jasekan, has a bee farm with 20 beehives. Each hive contains 15 comb frames. To check the readiness and quantity of the Combs for honey harvesting, she has to manually lift each wooden bar frame which sometimes yields no results because the honey isn't ready enough for harvesting.This daily routine for Saida is a slow and arduous task.

In comes Smart Bee. We provide sensors that are attached to the beehives which alerts the farmer to know the readiness of the comb for harvesting. Thus, she does less to make more. Consequently is able to increase profitability and expand. The sensor will also make sure her conditions in the hives are condusive for honey production. Smart Bee's Sensor when upgraded will help check the quality of the honey.

The Honey Sensor was built by consulting a hardware developer who designed the sensor to check defined parameters. A software developer was also brought on board to develop an on-site application for the monitoring device to interpret the measurements taken for the bee keeper. When Saida uses our honey sensor, she only needs to open the hive because she is sure the honey is ready for harvest just by seeing the green light which signifies readiness for harvest. Red light of the sensor means it's not ready at all while Yellow signifies the presence of little honey in the comb. With the Sensor, she can also know the temperature and humidity levels of each hive.

Challenges we run into was; the problem of constant internet and mobile network coverage , financing the project, ensuring our applications were user friendly across all demographics.

Smart Bee seems to be the first company ever to develop a device that helps Bee keepers monitor the state of readiness and quality of their honey. Smart Bee is also proud of creating a 100% internet free device.

In the process of bringing our sensor into existence, as a team we learnt how to cooperate among ourselves. Also, we have learnt and researched on bee farming. Finally, one key thing we have all learnt is to realise how powerful our creative capabilities are.

The Vision for Smart Bee is to further design our Honey Sensor into a mobile device that can be bought by individuals who wants to check the quality of honey they buy. Also, Smart Bee envisions her company to becoming the authority in the optimization of honey production. Thank you.

Submitted to

KIC Female Entrepreneurship Hackathon
- Winner Souveniers and Bragging Rights

Created by

My name is Adofowah and this is a short description of my contribution to this awesome project. From the start of the project till we won. It was a team effort. However, I was instrumental in finding solutions to each stage of Saida’s problem. When we were brainstorming what aspect of the agricultural industry to tackle,my teammate Vanessa brought our mind to the fact that beekeepers in Ghana go through a lot of trouble to harvest. The typical example being Saida in Jasekan.. I suggested that what if we make a device that can detect when it’s ready? All my teammates agreed and Vanessa and Debbie suggested we make a sensor which will be attached to the beehive and detect the readiness by measuring the predetermined weight of a ready honeycomb frame.
I also suggested that since bees are going extinct, how do we make sure our devices helps them grow? We then agreed to also give our device a feature that also detects that the conditions in the beehives are conducive for their growth and quality of the honey they produce. Helping solve the problem of bees going extinct and also the problem of Quality check for pure honey.
I also suggested that we should use the color red to depict “not ready”, yellow for “halfway done” and green from “ready” I was inspired by our national Flag’s red, gold, green and black star.
An an information scientist, I was tasked with researching information on the World Wide Web. I found out real problems faced by beekeepers, how many of them are in the country and how we can best help them . If he to my back ground in information studies I was able to suggest we use a LAN and WAN to connect our devices on the farms . Thereby, cutting out the challenge of internet and USSD issues and cost. I also suggested we make our devices solar so beekeepers will reduce cost of energy consumption since hives are out in the open anyway especially here in the tropics.
I added at the end that make out device have a feature where it signals to the bees to leave the hives and allow them out even better beekeeper sets foot on the farm. All my teammates agreed. That way, beekeepers won’t have to use smoke (which is not healthy to the neither the bees or the beekeepers) to sack them before the harvest. Finally I pointed out that we make a prototype of our product out of cardboard to show to our audience and judges to demonstrate how it will work. I’m proud to say i was able to make the prototype with the help of all my teammates especially Yaa. Also my proudest moment of course was when we had the chance to pitch our project. Irene lead the pitch and we won the hackathon out of 15 teams.
At the end, I will say I’ve learnt that team work involves so much more than just giving suggestions and bringing out our individual skills, but also about listening to others and supporting each other to bring our common dream to life . I’m happy to have had this experience and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else. Special thanks to Kosmos Energy and their KIC Women Bootcamp initiative for this opportunity. I’m forever grateful.

Akua Adofowah Adjei
Yaa Binka
Deborah Anorh
Vanessa Agbemor
Irene Safoa Osei-Bonsu

Updates

Deborah Anorh started this project — Dec 03, 2019 02:09 PM EST

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