Automated monitoring of bee behaviour using connected hives: Towards a computational apidology

Abstract

A major difficulty in studying the behaviour of social insects, such as bees, is to collect quantitative data on large numbers of individuals and over long periods of time, in sometimes dark and not easily accessible nests. Over the past decade, connected hives equipped with large sets of sensors to monitor real-time data about bee colony health and environmental conditions have been increasingly used in fundamental research, precision beekeeping and outreach programs. Here, we argue that combining these connected hive systems with automated movement tracking devices to obtain long-term data about the behaviour of bees inside and outside the hive can lead to major breakthroughs by helping discover new behaviours and compare data across labs and species. First, we describe the main sensors and hive parameters commonly used in connected hives used for honey bee and bumblebee colonies. Next, we discuss how developing more integrated systems connecting bees, hives and their environment, will help ask novel fundamental questions on bee behaviour and ecology.

Summer weather conditions influence winter survival of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in the northeastern United States

“…Thus, longer summers could result in high Varroa levels in the fall, which could negatively affect winter survival. Evaluation of colony growth patterns throughout the season using automated hive scales may provide insights into how weather conditions during the summer are influencing fall colony size and winter mortality 21 , 69 .…”

Markerless tracking of an entire insect colony

“…The dynamics and spatial arrangement of these variables provide new quantitative data for sociometric analysis [36][37][38][39] and will be particularly interesting in the context of a collapsing colony. Colony-wide, high-resolution tracking augments larger-scale measures such as weight 55 and can be combined with additional hive sensors for a novel surveillance system 56 . The automatic nature of our approach also facilitates the imaging of multiple hives 57 , an important consideration due to colony-to-colony variability.…”

Approaches, challenges and recent advances in automated bee counting devices: A review

“…Honey bee colonies tend to strongly vary in flight traffic depending on the available food sources, health status and weather conditions (reviewed in Marchal et al, 2020). To evaluate counters of any type, ground truth or empirical evidence needs to be obtained by a reference device with a known precision or by human evaluators.…”