Breakfast Canyon Discovered in Honeybee Hive Weight Curves

Abstract

Electronic devices to sense, store, and transmit data are undergoing rapid development, offering an ever-expanding toolbox for inventive minds. In apiculture, both researchers and practitioners have welcomed the opportunity to equip beehives with a variety of sensors to monitor hive weight, temperature, forager traffic and more, resulting in huge amounts of accumulated data. The problem remains how to distil biological meaning out of these data. In this paper, we address the analysis of beehive weight monitored at a 15-min resolution over several months. Inspired by an overlooked, classic study on such weight curves we derive algorithms and statistical procedures to allow biological interpretation of the data. Our primary finding was that an early morning dip in the weight curve (‘Breakfast Canyon’) could be extracted from the data to provide information on bee colony performance in terms of foraging effort. We include the data sets used in this study, together with R scripts that will allow other researchers to replicate or refine our method.

Traces of a Neonicotinoid Induce Precocious Foraging and Reduce Foraging Performance in Honey Bees

“…A total of 294 bees from two imidacloprid treated hives and a total of 260 bees from two control hives performed at least one trip of more than a minute and were kept for the experiment. The global flight patterns of these bees matched expectations from previous work on bee activity, ,,− i.e., more foragers left the hive in the morning and more returned in the evening (Figure ); orientation flights lasted 2.88 min ± 0.05 (mean ± standard error) and foraging flights lasted 21.55 min ± 0.27, and bees in the control group started foraging 9.24 days ± 4.46 after emergence.…”

“…Colonies were fed a total of 20 kg of control or imidacloprid sugar syrup over 6 weeks, as in previous experiments, , in a black plastic in-hive frame feeder to keep the syrup in the dark. Bee colonies commonly collect between 1 and 2 kg of nectar during nectar flows at the beginning of the summer, so this amount only represents a small fraction of what colonies might gather and process over such a time period. − All the syrup was consumed by the bees within the 6 weeks. This concentration corresponds to residues of imidacloprid treatments, sometimes referred to as “trace” amounts at concentrations found in plants, bees, and hive products. ,,,,,− Imidacloprid is found at average concentrations of 10 μg/kg in sunflowers and 2.1 μg/kg in maize pollen, and on cotton crops, its concentration ranges between 1.6 to 64.6 μg/kg in the pollen and between 0 and 1.8 μg/kg in the nectar .…”

Traces of a neonicotinoid pesticide stimulates activity in honey bee colonies, but not productivity

“…These values were calculated from 1 Sept. to 31 Oct. and so include many days when foraging was poor (nectar ows in general ceased by early Oct.). Some days each year were excluded from the analysis because of hive manipulations, rain, or poor curve ts 27 . These results indicate that imidacloprid colonies overall had a larger population of active foragers despite not having larger bee populations.…”

Effects of late miticide treatments on foraging and colony productivity of European honey bees (Apis mellifera)

“…Piecewise regressions were fit to the daily weight variations of individual hives using a modified version of the method detailed in (Meikle et al 2018;Holst and Meikle 2018). Briefly, the rolling standard deviation was calculated every three minutes and averaged daily, and a conservative threshold derived from a histogram plot of the daily rolling standard deviation was used to exclude days were measurements were erroneous due to rain or animals interfering with the scale measurements (35 out of 6373 individual data points inferior to − 2.5 kg of daily weight loss were removed).…”