Hi @Sarah_Newton ,
Thank you for your message!
For positioning the sensor inside a beehive @henri might have a good idea about this, please wait for his reply.
In general, wireless signals have tendency to get attenuated and even blocked by physical barriers, especially with certain materials. We have written a support article to help you to improve wireless signal reception. If you have a line of sight to your Ruuvi sensor, the Bluetooth signal could in theory be received up to 200 meters in ideal conditions, but with any physical barrier in between this can drop to less than a tenth or even get completely blocked. Your mobile device wireless capabilities can also vary depending of the make and model of your device.
Our Ruuvi Station Android app supports data forwarding to a third party server, but it’s not really designed to be a long term solution and may be quite impractical requiring a spare mobile device to be powered, keeping it within signal range and even possibly paying for the data collection service. Instead, Ruuvi sensors record measurements to internal memory at a lower interval (5 minutes interval, up to 10 days history can be stored), which can then be downloaded to Ruuvi Station app manually by pressing sync button on history view page, which might be a good (with no additional costs included) starting point for you, depending on your beehive size of course.
If you are up for a little DIY, you could also build your own system using Raspberry Pi, there is an interesting discussion regarding this on our forum.
The most trouble-free solution with an improved wireless signal range and a complete remote monitoring system including data storage in cloud and much more can be achieved using our Ruuvi Gateway and a subscription. Internet connection is required for collecting data to cloud service. It’s also possible to use Ruuvi Gateway with your own solution with a bit of tinkering, here are few links for this:
I hope these ideas will get you started!