Beekeepers were losing bee colonies due to hive theft, diseases and lack of environmental data. Traditional monitoring requires physical presence — which is impossible with dispersed apiaries. Lack of early warning about anomalies led to losses reaching thousands of zlotys annually.

We designed a compact tracker based on ESP32 with GPS and GSM modules. The device monitors location, temperature, humidity and vibrations. Data is transmitted via MQTT to the cloud and available in the Android/iOS app in real time. The alarm system notifies the beekeeper about theft, hive tipping or environmental anomalies.

ESP32 (FreeRTOS) · GPS + GSM + BLE · Temperature, humidity, accelerometer sensors · MQTT · Cloud backend · Android (Kotlin) + iOS (Swift) · Admin panel

ControlBee is sold in 5 European countries. The product won the gold medal at the APIMONDIA 2022 world beekeeping congress in Montreal. The project was supported by an EU Horizon 2020 grant under the DEMETER program. The system operates in hundreds of apiaries, monitoring thousands of hives.