Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is here to stay. In addition to various application areas, IoT is useful in the context of beekeeping, especially for digital and networked monitoring of hives. For practical implementation, differ-ent application layer protocols can be chosen. But which protocol is more suitable in the context of beekeeping? HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport)? This is one of the questions addressed in the Biene40 project, which focuses on networked sensors. In this paper, we derive the advantages and disadvantages of each protocol based on a literature review and the development of two IoT-based prototypes that communicate via either HTTP or MQTT. Our research show that the message overhead of the MQTT protocol is lower than that of HTTP. However, the connection cost of MQTT is quite high, especially at the beginning of a connection. Therefore, the choice of protocol depends on the specific use case. If only a few messages are transmitted at long intervals, HTTP is more resource efficient. With respect to the developed prototypes and the application context of beehive monitoring, HTTP is the preferred choice.