On the Importance of the Sound Emitted by Honey Bee Hives

Abstract

Recent years have seen a worsening in the decline of honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) colonies. This phenomenon has sparked a great amount of attention regarding the need for intense bee hive monitoring, in order to identify possible causes, and design corresponding countermeasures. Honey bees have a key role in pollination services of both cultivated and spontaneous flora, and the increase in bee mortality could lead to an ecological and economical damage. Despite many smart monitoring systems for honey bees and bee hives, relying on different sensors and measured quantities, have been proposed over the years, the most promising ones are based on sound analysis. Sounds are used by the bees to communicate within the hive, and their analysis can reveal useful information to understand the colony health status and to detect sudden variations, just by using a simple microphone and an acquisition system. The work here presented aims to provide a review of the most interesting approaches proposed over the years for honey bees sound analysis and the type of knowledge about bees that can be extracted from sounds.

IoT-Based Bee Swarm Activity Acoustic Classification Using Deep Neural Networks

“…It has been shown that the bee activity acoustic monitoring accuracy could be improved further in this way. The achieved accuracy was comparable to results of other systems with similar complexity [20,23,25,26]. The hidden layer parameter variation also influenced the complexity of the acoustic models.…”

“…Convolutional neural networks with MFCC features were used by the authors in [22]. A more detailed review of bee activity acoustic analysis literature can be found in [26].…”

“…The artificial intelligence animal acoustic analysis requires the use of sound recordings collection. Various authors [9,26] have already pointed out the drawback for research of the small amount of bee sound recordings freely available. Particularly problematic is the amount and length of recordings covering the swarm activity.…”

“…Particularly problematic is the amount and length of recordings covering the swarm activity. A relevant literature review has shown [26] that there has been no significant improvement recently. The freely available research data amount has not increased.…”

Janus: A Combined Radar and Vibration Sensor for Beehive Monitoring

“…We are all familiar with the buzz of bee wings, which is typically at 270 Hz. At other times one can hear intermittent sounds, such as queen bees tooting (550 Hz) or quacking (300 Hz), or workers piping (400 Hz) [7][8][9]. Most bee sounds are well below 600 Hz.…”