Soundscape Indices: New Features for Classifying Beehive Audio Samples

Abstract

As the study of honey bee health has gained attention in the biology community, researchers have looked for new, non-invasive methods to monitor the health status of the colony. Since the beehive sound alters when the colony is exposed to stressors, analysis of the acoustic response of the colony has been used as a method to identify the type of stressor, whether it is chemical, pest, or disease. So far, two feature sets have been successfully used for this kind of analysis, being these low-level signal features and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). Here we propose using soundscape indices, developed initially to delineate acoustic diversity in ecosystems, as an alternative to now used features. In our study, we examine the beehive acoustic response to trichloromethane laced-air and blank air and compare the performance of all three feature sets to discern the colony's sound between the hive being exposed to the chemical and not. Our results show that sound indices overperform the alternative features sets on this task. Based on these findings, we consider sound indices to be a valid set of features for beehive sound analysis and present our results to call the attention of the community on this fact.

Beehive Sound: Can It Indicate The Response Of Honey Bees To Chemicals In Or Out Of The Beehive?

“…Research by Sharif (2020) has shown that the sound of beehives can be in uenced by volatile chemical compounds in the air, such as acetone, ethyl ether, glutaric dialdehyde and trichloromethane. In addition, these changes can be identi ed by the ML model.…”

“…Cejrowski et al (2020) also presented a method that uses Mel Frequency Cepstral Coe cients (MFCCs) features and an SVM classi er to de ne the start and the end of the presumed bees-night in summer. In addition to MFCCs, soundscape indices are considered to be a valid set of features for acoustic analysis of a beehive, and call the attention of research community to further employ them in bioacoustics-related investigations (Sharif et al, 2020).…”

Approaching Quietness as an Urban Sustainability Opportunity

“…The analysis of digital sound recordings and the extraction of the Acoustic Indices (AI) [80] have been used for Rapid Biodiversity Assessment (RBA) [81] in an increasing rate for a variety of environments [82][83][84]. Furthermore, the scientific field of ecoacoustics [85,86] has offered a new approach regarding the investigation of the ecological role of sound [87][88][89][90].…”

Bee Products: A Representation of Biodiversity, Sustainability, and Health

“…Acute and chronic oral administration of ultrapure TiO 2 particulate matter to adult bees altered the bee microbial community; therefore, airborne particulate matter may represent an additional risk factor for honeybee health, promoting sublethal effects against the gut microbiota [ 216 ]. The second most recent paper was a work by Sharif et al [ 217 ] that, by looking for new, non-invasive methods to monitor the health status of the colony, introduced new features for classifying beehive audio samples using the soundscape indices [ 217 ]. In 2021, Nicewicz et al [ 218 ] outlined the antioxidant capacity of honey from an urban apiary and honey from a rural apiary [ 218 ].…”