“Times they are a changing,” was a principal topic at the Second International Workshop on Electronic and Hive Monitoring held in Missoula, Montana as part of the Western Apicultural Society (WAS) meeting in 2014. That event featured the work of Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk and his team at the University of Montana, pioneers in this technology.
Four years later, Dr. Frank Linton took it upon himself to bring the third workshop to fruition at the Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS) meeting in Hampton Virginia, August 2018. He invited a stellar team of inventors/researchers involved in this field, including some who were also featured in Montana, but continuing to look more in-depth at what electronic monitoring might do for the beekeeper. Notably lacking was the presence of Dr. Bromenshenk at the event, who was entertaining the crowd at the Western Apicultural Society in Boise, Idaho, with similar topics.
In the preamble to the workshop, Dr. Linton published the following: “The current high rate of colony loss, 30%-40% annually, presents beekeepers with a conundrum. More-frequent inspections might reduce these losses by revealing small problems before they become big ones, but every inspection disturbs the bees and unnecessary inspections may themselves contribute to colony losses.
“Still, for many backyard beekeepers, the issue is not too many inspections but too few. How can beekeepers be alerted to small problems before they become big ones – avoiding either too many inspections or too few? The solutions presented in this workshop principally involve inserting sensors into hives to monitor colony health and productivity remotely. Like those in your automobile, electronic sensors in your colonies can keep you informed of your colonies’ well-being and alert you to problems early-on.”
Dr. Linton kicked off the event by looking at the comparative history of beekeeping since the 1850s in conjunction with development of the standard hive now in almost universal use. Current monitoring activities usually employ things that beekeepers have always used to a varying degree to record relevant observations, including sticks and stones to indicate the results of inspections inside a colony (some may even write down their reflections in a notebook!) and/or employing and relying on one’s experience by simply looking at outside conditions (weather) and inside a colony, and/or closely examining entrance behavior for evidence of “abnormality.” . Collectively, these over time become essential in developing what many for lack of a better word call, the “art” of beekeeping.
The current apicultural environment, Dr. Linton concludes, is now being informed by broader changes in general on the farm and in the field, called “precision agriculture.” This uses technology to measure in much greater detail some or all of the following elements:
1. Weight: bees and honey (totals, rates of change), effecting swarming, robbing
2. Temperature: brood volume, winter cluster volume, with reference to queen quality
3. Audio: flight, fanning, associated with stress from parasites, diseases and queenlessness
4. Video: flight, pollen collection and morphology, reflected in swarming, absconding, and and entrance activity, indicating the presence of diseases, nectar sources, and pollutants
6. Other elements might include: CO2 concentration, humidity, electrical charge, vibration, Infra-red light, weather, and intricate knowledge of hive location indicating damage and/or theft.
Dr. Linton is also a pioneer in one of the most important ways honey bees can now be monitored, observation hives. Author of the book The Observation Hive Handbook: Studying Bees as Home , and calling himself “The Beepeeker,” he maintains a comprehensive website on the subject. Finally, he also collects information on other ways of monitoring honey bee health via electronic monitoring, and was present at the first event of this nature in conjunction with the 2012 Eastern Apicultural Society meeting in Vermont.
Within the context of precise measuring, another concept was in constant use during the workshop. How to use “big data” in numerous ways to assist not only individuals, but also government agencies, researchers, beekeeping manufacturers and others involved in keeping honey bees and beekeepers as healthy as possible. To the mantra for the workshop back in 2014 must now be added “if honey is money, data is gold.” Given more attention to monitoring honey bee colonies, it is becoming increasingly apparent to researchers and practitioners alike that beekeeping is on the verge of transforming into a modern pastoral pursuit, and so must take its rightful place in the current precision agricultural environment.
A most useful tool for monitoring honey bees has to do with measuring hive weight. Every beekeeper knows this somehow in their being and so “hefting” a colony to get a sense of its weight is the first thing many usually do as part of any colony inspection. Putting a beehive on a scale, therefore, is a traditional technology that is increasingly used to indicate its well being.
Wayne Esais, now retired from NASA’s Goddard Space Center, took center stage with his hive scale application during the 2014 workshop referred to at the time as “honeybeenet.” The idea came from observations that honey flows were occurring later with each passing year. Dr. Esais, therefore, became somewhat of guru in terms of measuring honey bee activity via the hive scale. His project morphed into a “citizen science” activity that has now been subsumed into the Bee Informed Partnership’s (BIP) Sentinel Apiary Program. A poster presentation at the workshop reveled this effort in some detail, and is the genesis for many other programs that have cropped up since. Several kinds of “improved scales” were on display at this year’s workshop and practically every new device has hive scale measurement as its base.
Rafael Cabrera described the Solution Bee Hive, which takes the scale hive into a different realm. The Smart Hive Monitor scale connected to the Smart Data Collector and takes readings continuously every15 minutes. The resulting information can be read by smart phones and also moved into the Internet cloud for further analysis. Specific graphing traces of changing weighgt can then be read by the beekeeper to potentially among other things determine when to feed, add equipment, take off honey, control swarming, detect robbing and even distinguishing separate honey flows. This is not an inexpensive piece of equipment, retailing around $290 per unit. It also is dependent on batteries, which at the moment is the “Achilles heel” of this application. Look for this to change in the future. The Bee Informed partnership has published a review of this application.
Andrew Wootton of Melbourne Australia provided a discussion of electronic monitoring of honey bee colonies via the so-called “internet of things.” This was a reprise of his presentation at the 2014 workshop. He also provided a description of a do-it-yourself solar hive scale that enterprising folks might make themselves or purchase. According to this website, “HiveTool™ is a collection of readily available, off-the-shelf hardware and free, open rel source software that continuously monitors a beehive. Computerized hive monitors provide real time and historic data and graphs of weight, internal and ambient temperature, humidity and light levels which give the beekeeper a noninvasive view into the hive. HiveTool won the 2015 Bayer Bee Care Community Leadership Award.”
Also reprising their activity, were the folks at Hive Tracks. This is perhaps the most well-known of the monitoring systems based in the U.S. The genesis and early history of the program are well documented. As noted in 2014, Hive Tracks differs from several of the other systems as it is not “real time”, relying instead on beekeepers visiting colonies in the field to collect and record the data.
That may change, however, according to Hive Tracks developers: “As the realization of the vision we had more than five years ago continues to take shape, we believe the fun has just begun in terms of what is possible with only the tip of the iceberg exposed so far. Hive Tracks is built on a solid foundation of fundamental data of yard, hive, and inspection information that is important to all beekeepers no matter the size of their operation.
“However, much more is technologically possible including collecting data from instrumented hives (sensors for weight, temperature, humidity, and audio), connecting beekeepers through social media, forums, and information sharing, analyzing the combined data of beekeepers (big data for beekeepers), and an endless list of cool features including any number of reports like honey production per hive or per yard, longitudinal queen performance, hive success when started from a nuc vs. split vs. package, etc.
“The area of instrumented hives has always been one of high interest to us since combining observational data from Hive Tracks with instrumented hive data yields incredibly valuable information for a beekeeper. Perhaps even more importantly, this combination of data from a world wide network of beekeepers would be significant for honey bee research. In the past three years, there has been rapid development of commercial solutions for the hive scale problem with multiple vendors in the market now with one of the most extensive monitoring systems being offered by Arnia, which includes weight, temp, humidity, and sound, as well as analysis of the data to detect hive events.”
In an effort to promote greater awareness, Hive Tracks is involved in developing a grant in cooperation with the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), which has morphed into a not-for-profit organization. This collaboration of efforts across the country from some of the leading research labs and universities in agriculture and science is expected to be extremely valuable for the monitoring community going forward. Finally, Hive Tracks is considering a commercial beekeeping package asking those interested to contact them about this exciting possibility.
Arnia, noted above, continues to be a standout in the monitoring field. Huw Evans, the founder, provided a great number of detailed graphs, showing a series of population and honey bee trafficking outputs, which indicated everything from nectar flow starting and stopping to condition of the queen. These traces are increasingly being seen as more and more real and relevant to hive condition. Arnia appears to be holding onto its “star status” declared in the 2014 workshop, in terms of real time monitoring. It appears to have crossed the Rubicon, by developing something that defies most beekeepers’ experience, and will no doubt be tested scientifically in the future, an actual mathematical formula characterizing swarming in honey bees!
Tracking individual bees is more difficult that might seem at first. It can be confused by irregular honey bee movement, including hesitating near the sensor and/or not completing exiting or fully entering the sensed exit. This happens if the two-wire tripping mechanism Arnia uses is not fully crossed by the bee. It is possible, however, to look at traffic information with reference to other variables, via data managed by the Arnia “gateway,” including foraging strength (number of bees in the field at any time), nectar availability(average time per trip), in-field death rate (how many bee don’t return), and environmental influences (nectar or pollen foraging). Weather information can also be recorded, including rainfall.
In addition, it’s possible to monitor the activity of other organisms found in and around the bee colony using Arnia, including small hive beetle (adults and larvae), wax moth (adults and larvae), workers and drones, even Europe’s newest honey bee pest, the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina, A new apparatus appears to be in the wings as well, which will include a smaller, more robust hive monitor that has longer lasting batteries, along with the traditional humidity, temperature, and acoustic sensors and an external weather pack. At least two types of scales are available (pro and basic), and the all-important gateway (providing low power radio network communication) to handle the collected data. A review of the Arnia system by the Bee Informed Partnership has been published.
Arnia is a partner in what is called the Internet of Bees or IoBee Consortium, “…providing the possibility to set-up the first European Network for Integrated Beehive Health Management. The IoBee systems in each beekeeping SME can be connected to their respective associations.”
“IoBee aims to disrupt the bee-keeping market by providing effective, timely and user-friendly monitoring systems. The project focuses on the commercialisation of a new application of the Internet of Things (IoT) sensor, able to automatically assess the health and threat status of colonies, becoming the technical framework for a European Interoperable and Open Surveillance Network for Bee Health.
“The information collected by each bee-keeper association or cluster, can provide bee health/threat/mortality status information at regional and national scales, giving regional and national authorities a powerful tool to understand at a higher level the impacts and risks imposed by the presence of a disease or pest.
“As IoBee follows IoT and Geospatial standards ensuring full interoperability, EU countries using this system can share their data at a transnational level between themselves and with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), other authorities (e.g. EEA), and professional networks (e.g. Bee2Bees and COLOSS), establishing the 1st EU Bee Health surveillance network.”
Timing is everything in human and honey bee health, according to Kelton Temby of “EyesonHives.” He reported that some two million brain cells die each minute during a human stroke event, increasing risk of permanent brain damage, disability or death. Recognizing symptoms and acting FAST to get medical attention can save a life and limit disabilities.”
The same kind of thing might be happening in beehives, though perhaps at a smaller scale, so it makes sense that what happens in human medicine may translate into how a beekeeper might monitor a beehive and get to the “patient” on time to do something about it. Human doctors are increasingly looking at symptoms quickly and developing ways (algorithms) of coping with complex situations, “getting the right person to the right job fast.”
Enter Keltronix, concludes Mr. Temby, which states on its website, “Whether honey bees, bumble bees or something else, our in-field video analytics technology and ability to execute is unmatched. Ask us what you need.” Somebody apparently did about monitoring honey bees and so Keltronix came up with a camera and associated algorithms seeking to do just that. With this technology, according to Mr. Temby, it is possible to continuously film one of the major indicators of a honey bee colony’s health, entrance activity, and make some judgments about what might be going on, including number of bees entering and exiting, number of bees flying around the entrance and other “pulses” of the colony. It is well known, for example, that entrance activity is reduced with a queenless hive. Several participants a the workshop mentioned a book entitled: At The Hive Entrance by H. Storch
EyesOnHives is new technology. It suffers from a limited scope of its monitoring possibilities as well, given it exclusively videos entrance activity. Only the future will tell where this goes from here. It has a “citizens science” focus, which more and more monitoring programs are becoming involved with.
Not much has traditionally been said about the importance of brood in a honey bee colony when it comes to monitoring activity. Broodminder seeks to change that. A mantra here might be, “got brood?” Brood, temperature and moisture are related, so the developers think insights will come from monitoring these together. The Brood Minder website says, that “by performing simple, uniform measurements on thousands of hives, the beekeeping community will gain insights into hive distress and that as a community, we will develop interventions to improve outcomes.” Citizen science is also a big part of broodminder activity. The data is shared at and in the public domain, identified only by zip code.
The sensors are limited in broodminder technology. They sell a temperature and humidity monitor for inside the colony, and a scale to look at weight loss/gain. In addition, they market a specialized gateway apparatus (Cell) to collect the data and ship it to the cloud or one’s smart phone. In order to collect the data one must actually visit the apiary and hive so it lacks abilities other “real time” applications have. The Bee Informed Partnership has reviewed the product . It is the least expensive apparatus on that list.
Dr. Jeff Groff Shepard University Professor, Shepard, West Virginia provided some information on his interest in developing improved sensing in a honey bee colony. A beekeeper for only about two years, he is basically learning from the ground up about the craft of apiculture. One thing he realized early on is that it would be beneficial to have more than one temperature sensor in a colony, which right now with current technology is the norm.
Temperature has both spatial as well as temporal distribution in a colony he says, and so is developing a prototype design to cover these possibilities. He provided a history of temperature in general and the kinds of sensors that have been developed in beehives running from mercury thermal to thermacouple to thermal infrared. Non-contact sensors are also needed in beehive monitoring: “Many temperature sensing applications can benefit from non-contact sensing methods. The measurement target may be: moving, above the melting point of other sensors, mechanically of chemically hostile or simply at too great a distance to run wires. Some non-contact methods can also be faster than traditional contact methods of temperature measurement. Most practical non-contact sensors use infrared (IR) radiation and are referred to as IR Temperatures Sensors or IR Detectors.”
Not part of the workshop, but on view in Hampton were photos taken by Dr. Wyatt Mangum in his search for an optimal way to look at colony health via infrared photography. He has reviewed several cameras for this purpose He also authored an in-depth discussion on beehive ventilation, something that is not easily measured, but certainly correlated somewhat with temperature. Dr. Groff is also investigating putting sensors into both worker and brood combs. This could conjure up a sensor war of sorts. How many sensors can a beehive tolerate without actually shifting its own behavior in response? We all look forward to the results of Dr. Groff’s work.
Dr. Joseph Cazier of the Hive Tracks team took the audience on a deep dive into a the current discussion of “big data.” . With something like 20,000 beekeepers managing 100,000 colonies, Hive Tracks can now begin looking at the same kinds of data analytics currently in use in other forms of precision agriculture. As noted previously, lots of reliable data is the fuel for further developments in the beehive monitoring field. Basically big data is nothing more than the collective results of a large number of scientific experiments. In addition, the information must be comparable and also importantly, publicly available and “freely exchanged.” The sources of this data are numerous, including human intervention, mechanical effort (tractors), natural world behavior, and all kinds of sensory and other data.
Collecting the data, according to Dr. Cazier, results in a “smart hive.” Of course, he concludes, it’s only smart if the user analyzes the information and acts on it. The ultimate goal is to, in essence, “tell you about yourself.”
This all can result in something called the “genius hive.” Dr. Cazier defines it as the result of an amalgamation of collected data from a large number of sources (hives), generating a standard data set that can be analyzed by machine learning, and finally resulting in best management practices based on the information. The goal of the genius hive is to predict behavior “before it happens,” giving the beekeeper time to adjust management strategy.
For this to happen, Dr. Cazier said, four steps are needed.
1. Determine what data should be collected and the best way to acquire it
2. Figure out how to evaluate the resultant information to develop best management practices
3. Integrate data collection using machine learning to best determine how it can be effectively used
4. Continually use and improve the system
If all of the above steps are implemented, evidence-based beekeeping based on big data could be established as a true path to the genius hive. This requires everyone to work together, sharing standardized information Dr. Cazier concluded, and could result in fact in a new “language” for beekeepers. The reality of this concept occurred February 27, 2017 with the launch of the Beexml website, “Exchanging Data about bees and Beekeeping.”
The preamble for this new language includes the following as part of the website: “Governmental institutions, academic research projects as well as breeding programs of beekeeping associations inevitable gather data about bees and beekeepers. Unfortunately these databases become data islands and the information is of limited value for the beekeeping community as a whole.
“BeeXML is intended to be the answer to this problem. The project is not about creating a central database. Rather, XML is a self-describing data format that can allow the exchange of data. In order to create an XML standard, it is necessary to agree on what data is collected on a particular topic. The self-describing structure makes the exchange much more flexible than it would be with rigid table definitions.”
The BeeXML website is now collecting and establishing links to organizations and other projects where honey bee related data are routinely collected and used. Two in the U.S. are listed are listed, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), referred to elsewhere in this article, and the USDA National Agricultural Statistics (NASS). Several more are international in scope, including the European Coloss.org effort consisting of 1155 members and 95 countries http://www.coloss.org/
Another project that can contribute to this according to Dr. Cazier, is the Healthy Colony Checklist, developed by Dick Rogers of Bayer Bee Care in Raleigh, North Carolina:
“Dick Rogers, Research Entomologist and Manager at the Bayer North American Bee Care Center explains some of the objectives behind the Healthy Hives 2020 initiative, which brings many stakeholders with an interest in honey bee health together to look for solutions to the challenges bees face in our modern world in a video from the Beecare Bayer website.”
Mr. Rogers was on the original schedule for this workshop, but circumstances appear to have prevented his attendance. Fortunately his philosophy and reasoning can be seen in a series of videos on the Beecare.Bayer.Com website.
A final presentation by William G. Meikle of the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, Tucson, Arizona looked at the value of extensive honey bee colony monitoring in scientific study. The following paper is an example of this, attempting to look at colony loss through sublethal pesticide exposure: Meikle, W. G., Weiss, M. Monitoring Colony-level Effects of Sublethal Pesticide Exposure on Honey Bees. J. Vis. Exp. (129), e56355, doi:10.3791/56355 (2017). A video monitoring-colony-level-effects-sublethal-pesticide-exposure-on-honey of the basic procedure reveals how this can be done with a maximum of care to ensure the quality of the data.
At the workshop in Hampton, Dr. Meikle presented the results of another study entitled: “Continuous Bee Hive Weight and Temperature Data: Long-term vs. Within-day Changes.” This year-long effort looked at hive weight, temperature and carbon dioxide shifts over different time periods in an attempt to develop conclusions. In general, it confirmed the value of continuous colony monitoring that others were able to show during the 2018 workshop.
There was considerable discussion at the 2014 event concerning the role of radio-frequency identification or RFID tags, principally used to mark and locate honey bee colonies, but also having the possibility of a number of other future functions. The wikipedia page on this technology concludes:
“Since RFID tags can be attached to cash, clothing, and possessions, or implanted in animals and people, the possibility of reading personally-linked information without consent has raised serious privacy concerns. These concerns resulted in standard specifications development addressing privacy and security issues. ISO/IEC 18000and ISO/IEC 29167 use on-chip cryptography methods for untraceability, tag and reader authentication, and over-the-air privacy. ISO/IEC 20248 specifies a digital signature data structure for RFID and barcodes providing data, source and read method authenticity. This work is done within ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31 Automatic identification and data capture techniques. Tags can also be used in shops to expedite checkout, and to prevent theft by customers and employees.
“In 2014, the world RFID market was worth US$8.89 billion, up from US$7.77 billion in 2013 and US$6.96 billion in 2012. This figure includes tags, readers, and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs, and all other form factors. The market value is expected to rise to US$18.68 billion by 2026.”
Beaver Plastics has rolled out a special RFID chip for beekeepers on display in Hampton. It’s not the chip so much that’s significant here, but its unique placement. The following explanation is given in their sales brochure:
“Each BP Langstroth Honeybee Brood Box has a permanent, embedded, and unique identification number that can be read from 2.4-3.0 metres (8-10 feet) using a hand-held or fixed RFID reader-writer. Having permanent identification will help you manage hives, deter theft, aid law enforcement, and recover stolen property. Beaver Plastics makes its Langstroth Honeybee Brood Boxes from expanded polystyrene (EPS) using a precise molding technology. Designed specifically for the North American market, the boxes do not require winter wrapping and provide better temperature control in the spring. Beekeepers report greater yields and better overwintering survival rates. The BP Langstroth Honeybee Brood Box is ideal for commercial beekeeping. Beaver Plastics has field tested the boxes to ensure both robustness and durability. They can survive rigorous handling and are durable in a trying outdoor environment. The boxes are lightweight, making them easy to handle. They are also very strong because the high-density EPS and one-piece casting creates a tough single-molded unit.” An advantage of this technology is that potential thieves would simply be unaware that these extremely tough hives contained a chip and where it might be located. The chips are also inexpensive and so can be liberally deployed throughout the colony, even being located in/on the frames.
Two others displaying their wares at the workshop were Alan Hayes, demonstrating how to make an inexpensive hive scale, and Herb Aumann, who has come up with a radar microphone to monitor bee activity at the hive entrance and elsewhere. It is low cost, accurate, and can distinguish between honey bees departing from and arriving at a beehive.
As the event concluded, the remarks by Dr. Linton to begin the workshop seemed prescient. There are big potential rewards in precisely monitoring honey bee activity, but currently the process is expensive and more data collection is needed to ensure maximum reliability. Every beekeeper should be following the topics noted at this and previous workshops with anticipation. Like for most advanced technologies, prices are expected to come down over time. In fact, during the workshop, Solution Bee and Arnia announced new versions of their colony monitoring technologies at approximately half the price of previous offerings, and BroodMinder announced a low-priced wireless temperature sensor. These optimistic signs, along with an increasingly accurate prediction scenario over the next five years or so, are expected to inexorably shift electronic monitoring of honey bee colonies from what is currently possible to a far more practical realm. A follow up conference at the University of Montana in 2020 was held virtually, revealing improvements in older and newer technologies as this field is rapidly expanding.
