ADVISE, RESEARCH, COMMENT

If you're a beekeeper, entomologist, or sensor expert, please share any insights you have into what specific factors we can monitor within a beehive to indicate colony health, and why. Links to research papers and other materials are appreciated.

One of the big problems that we have here in urban areas is heatwaves - while the bees can 'beard' to cool down the hive, on the paved areas where our hives sit we have had significant kills when the tiles become too hot and cook the bees as they touch down, so external temp would be handy to monitor.

The other issue is internal temps - during prolonged heatwaves it tends to overwhelm the hive and you get wax melting inside the hive - very damaging and a bad mess to clean up. Our hive is that the office, so if there was some sort of warning that the internal temps are getting out of control we can take action by hosing the area down with water.

Hi @Jagungal we are planning to have temperature and humidity data for inside and outside the hive. These kinds of sensors are low hanging fruit, so count on them being available. We appreciate your novel use case and feedback.

I know weight monitoring has been mentioned, but I don't see a reference to in this forum.

Tracking the hive weight has several benefits:
- monitoring honey and brood weights - sign of a healthy laying queen.
- swarm detection/prevention
- hive to hive comparisons.

Seems like an apidictor is a good start.

http://www.beesource.com/build-it-yourself/apidictor/

http://www.google.com/patents/US7549907

Read through this patent. literature I've seen so far suggests nuances of the sound the bees are making from a monitoring standpoint is the most versatile measure of bee health. Whether or not there is a disease present in the hive, whether the bees are getting ready to swarm (are thermoregulating properly, there is a new queen, there is no queen, if they're being robbed, the list goes on) is all captured in the sound the bees make. I'm sure you guys have already read up on it. There's also a guy doing it with his iPhone.

http://www.instructables.com/id/iphone-apidictor-for-acoustal-beehive-swarm-detect/

This is fantastic info, thanks @keitharaneo. This iPhone app sounds amazing, though I'd be a little concerned about the telephone signals within the hive!

We are using a microphone device!

Hi,

I recently listened to a talk at our local bee keepers' club and the speaker suggested that some scientific research suggests an impact of newly introduced pesticides (neonicotinoids?) on (among others)

a) the ability of bees to recover their hive temperature after the keeper opened it and

b) their willingness to dance and let the other bees know where food sources are

So my thoughts would be to

a) have an open/closed indicator to track when a hive has been opened. Maybe this can be done with the light sensor (dark/light) or maybe even something like a magnetic sensor. This data can then be correlated with the temperature data to measure recovery time.

b) measure the vibrations from bee dances which supposedly all take place at a certain frequency. It seems that dancing bees make sure the sound of their dance is heard throughout the whole hive anyway. I'm not sure if the currently planned microphone can pick this up it it would be nice if it could.

Greetings from Karlsruhe
Nico

This is fantastic feedback @nicnab - thanks you for sharing. Check it out @aaronm

Hi @nicnab our current plans include the light sensor, so we'll be able to detect when the hives were opened and the subsequent effects on the data. I appreciate you pointing out that the whole colony is meant to hear the vibrations of the dances. The audio analysis piece is pretty complicated, so we'll be recruiting some data scientists to help, and stay tuned for online workshops with them to have input and ask questions.

Thanks for participating.