Performance and Health Monitoring and Analysis of Hive Scales Portal Web Application

Honey bee health and colony collapse disorder (CCD), a term coined in 2006, have been drawing global attention as bees are dying at a rapid rate. The University of Maryland reported that beekeepers across the US lost more than 40 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2014 to April 2015[1]. With seventy out of the top 100 human food crops, which supply about 90 percent of the world’s nutrition, being pollinated by bees [4], this puts our food supply at serious risk! Formed from a grant from the US Department of Agriculture, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) is a collaborative effort to address the declining honey bee population. A major part of this effort is being led by GVSU through the Hive Scales Portal web application. This application aggregates and stores data, collected from hive scales around the world, for researchers and scientists with the intent of identifying patterns that lead to best practices for caring for bees. As the quantity of contributing hives scales increase, the hive scale portal will need to scale proportionally. Knowing when or how much to scale is a guessing game without the proper visibility. The purpose of this project is to analyze the application and ensure it can scale. The key piece of this analysis is to integrate the necessary tools to ensure site health and performance visibility is available for continued monitoring