Sensor Advice

Hi,
I have a project where I need to detect a queen bee within a hive. My product is a clip-on the device which attaches to the front of the hive. The function of the device is to track the movement of the queen to determine her health and wellbeing.

I am currently thinking about using multiple hall effect sensors in the device to show where the queen bee is. The queen will have a magnet on her back. The sensor needs to detect both narrowly (30mm) and deep (500mm).
Which sensor do you think will be best. If you think there is another way possible to do this function, that would be muchly appreciated.

Thanks so much in advance :slight_smile:

A couple of things. I’m no bee expert, being allergic too them keeps me that way, but don’t some bees use the earths magnetic field to navigate? Wouldn’t magnets interfere with that?

A field from a magnet, especially one that’s small enough for a bee, can’t be detected that far away.

There are solutions. The CSIRO in partnership with Intel has used RFID but got in trouble from ACMA over it a while back when they didn’t get it right.

There’s some references to the trouble they made for Optus and Vodafone here:

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Thanks for the help Shaun.

Would you have any advice on what other technology or sensors would be possible to make this function?

I have been bouncing off the use of an RFID Chip with multiple readers to scan for the queen.

X-Ray Computerised Tomography (CT) along with machine learning.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8682000/8682842.stm
https://www.aussiebee.com.au/abol-007.html