Living Lab KDOJ 1: Campus Biodiversity

Impact

Community

Economy

Sustainability

Modules & Publications

Innovations

Collaboration

Residential college of Dato’ Onn Jaafar, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia is surrounded with forests which are rich in wildflowers and trees that excrete natural plant resins. We saw this an oppurtunity to reintroduce more local flora and fauna. Therefore, stingless bees hives have been brought into the area of KDOJ in gradual steps, since 2016. To date we are keeping total of 20 hives of stingless bees hives which mainly of the species Heterotrigona Itama. We also keeping stingless bee from the species of Geniotrigona Thoracica and Tetrigona Binghami. This is a part of the open area preservation where we planted more flowering plants to sustain the stingless bees colonies. We also aimed to be a breeding ground of stingless bees using alternative methods such as using stingless bee bait boxes and hive splitting techniques. Stingless bees can definitely fasten the process reproduction of native plants as they are important and efficient pollinators of crops.

a  residential  college  of  Dato’Onn  Jaafar,  at  Universiti 

Teknologi  Malaysia

as  shown  in  Fig.

7.    It  was  installed 

there  because  the  location  was  surrounded  with  forests 

which are rich in wildflowers and trees with natural plant

r

esins.

Stingless bees hives around the KDOJ area

Since 2016 we served as an education center for UTM students, staff, and even the public to learn about the stingless bee farms. Some of the list of previous visit and programs are:

a  residential  college  of  Dato’Onn  Jaafar,  at  Universiti 

Teknologi  Malaysia

as  shown  in  Fig.

7.    It  was  installed 

there  because  the  location  was  surrounded  with  forests 

which are rich in wildflowers and trees with natural plant

r

esins.

Activities	Date
Lawatan Pelajar berkenaan teknologi-teknologi dalam penternakan kelulut	27 January 2023
Undergraduates students visits on entrepreneur subject's assignment	8 March 2020
Stingless Bees Talk with the International Students	1 October 2020

a  residential  college  of  Dato’Onn  Jaafar,  at  Universiti 

Teknologi  Malaysia

as  shown  in  Fig.

7.    It  was  installed 

there  because  the  location  was  surrounded  with  forests 

which are rich in wildflowers and trees with natural plant

r

esins.

Undergraduates students visits on entrepreneur subject's assignment

Stingless Bees Talk with International Students

Alternative stingless bees breeding methods

Stingless Bees Talk teaching modules

Stingless Bees talk International students activities

One of the main outcomes from the living lab concepts is publications. It helps us extend the sharing of the knowledge and hoping it to be evolved into producing more concepts, technology, or knowledge, especially for the betterment of sustainability. The list of the publications are:

Title	Year	Publication Type
Internet of Things (IoT) Application in Meliponiculture	2017	Journal: Scopus indexed
Automated Honey Dehydrator based on Optimized Drying Air Heat	2018	Conference proceeding: non-indexed
IoT Platform for Precision Stingless Bee Farming	2019	Conference proceeding: Scopus indexed
An Optimized Honey Dehydration System with Drying Air Temperature and Relative Humidity Control	2019	Conference proceeding: Scopus indexed

To support the development program of the living lab KDOJ concept, the stingless bees honey are harvested for every 40 days and sell to the public using two packaging options of 74 gram and 300 gram bottles. Another direct benefit of the concept is the KDOJ office staffs have had been given a bottle of stingless bee honey every month, this can help them to increase their body immunity with stingless bee honey.

Stingless Bees honey products

KDOJ office staffs with the stingless bees honey given to them

We are driven to produce innovations that supports the living lab KDOJ concepts. The innovations are aligned with the Ministry of science , technology, and innovation, 10-10 MySTIE (science, tech, innovation & economy) framework. The list and description of the innovations are:

Innovation	Link
Smart Stingless Bee Farm System: EMAS \| Electronic Meliponini Advanced System	Description
Golden Cooler Running \| Honey Dehydrator	Description
MyTradeBee - Marketplace & Resources	Description
MyTradeBee Directory	Description

This application is based on an Android system which runs on any system with SDK Version 16 and above to assist stingless-bee farmers in recording information on the important aspects of stingless-bee keeping such as hive health, security, and hive produce on smart devices. In the invention, all information related to the hive is recorded and transferred to a Google Firebase real-time database. EMAS fetches all the information from the database and represents it on graphs and pages.

Golden Cooler Runnings is a system that can reduce the water percentage of stingless bee honey with a microcontroller to control the drying process employing temperature, drying air speed, relative humidity, and optimized honey exposure surface. The main objective is to reduce water content in stingless bee honey at 22 % in order to prevent rapid fermentation and delay crystallizationo

MyTradeBee is a classified ad platform for the bee community with websites and androids accesss Especially for the stingless bee community. People can sell their harvested honey or give service to other people through this platform. MyTradeBee Directory is a listing platform for the bee community. Also, people can find places to explore, eat, drink and shop nearest them. The main motive of this platform is to make the bee community stronger along with their local business.

We shared the engineering knowledge, through KDOJ mini series sharing session, that can help the stingless bees farmer to have an efficient honey pump system that can help them during the stingless bee honey harvesting process.

We have identified My Bee Savoir National Association as a strategic partners one of the current efforts is the formation of sustainability and Bee Saviour Club, university chapter. Next, is to Encourage future activities that appreciate the existing natural environment like bee conservation and knowledge sharing between university, schools, industries, and public. We also like to promote a healthy and active lifestyle through the bee keeping hobby etc. On top of the efforts we want to introduce more local flora and fauna through activities like planting or reforestation. The pasts and ongoing programs are as such bee removal from the KDOJ buildings to our collaborator farms and talks related to the bees conservation.