Beehive sensors offer hope in saving honeybee colonies
Innovation allows for remote monitoring of beehive health
A UC Riverside computer science team has developed a sensor-based technology that could revolutionize commercial beekeeping by reducing colony losses and lowering labor costs.
Called the Electronic Bee-Veterinarian, or EBV, the technology uses low-cost heat sensors and forecasting models to predict when hive temperatures may reach dangerous levels. The system provides remote beekeepers with early warnings, allowing them to take preventive action before their colonies collapse during extreme hot or cold weather or when the bees cannot regulate their hive temperature because of disease, pesticide exposure, food shortages, or other stressors.
“We convert the temperature to a factor that we are calling the health factor, which gives an estimate of how strong the bees are on a scale from zero to one,” said Shamima Hossain, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UCR and lead author of a paper explaining the technology.
This simplified metric — with a score of ‘one' meaning the bees are at full strength — allows beekeepers unfamiliar with the underlying model to assess hive health quickly.
Boris Baer, a UCR professor of entomology, believes the technology could revolutionize beekeeping, which is essential to vast sectors of global agriculture. Honeybees pollinate more than 80 crops and contribute an estimated $29 billion annually to U.S. agriculture. Yet bee populations have declined due to various factors, including habitat loss, pesticide exposure, parasites, and climate change.
“Over the last year, the U.S. lost over 55% of its honeybee colonies,” Baer said, citing data from Project Apis m., which monitors beehive losses throughout the U.S. “We are experiencing a major collapse of bee populations, and that is extremely worrying because about one-third of what we eat depends on bees.”
Beekeepers now rely on their own judgment and manual inspections to detect problems, often leading to delayed interventions. With EBV, they can get real-time insights and predict conditions days in advance, significantly reducing labor costs, said Baer, who collaborated with Hossain and other scientists at UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering.
“People have dreamed of these sensors for a very long time,” Baer said. “What I like here is that this system is fully integrated into the hive setup that beekeepers already use.”
Temperature fluctuations are among the first responses to any kind of threats to a hive’s health. Honeybees maintain a precise internal hive temperature between 33 and 36 degrees Celsius (91.4–96.8°F), a requirement for proper brood development and colony survival, Baer said.
The EBV method is based on thermal diffusion equations and control theory, making its predictions interpretable to both scientists and beekeepers, Hossain said. The model uses temperature data collected from low-cost sensors installed inside the hive, feeding that information into an algorithm that predicts hive conditions several days in advance.
In tests conducted at UCR’s apiary, the EBV method analyzed data from 10 hives during initial development and later expanded to 25 hives. The technology has already proven its effectiveness, detecting conditions that required beekeeper intervention.
“When I looked at the dashboard and saw the health factor dropped below an empirical threshold, I contacted our apiary manager,” Hossain recalled. “When we went to check the hive, we found that there was actually something wrong, and they were able to take action to manage the situation.”
Hyoseung Kim, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCR, explained that keeping costs low — under $50 per hive — is a high priority.
“There are commercial sensors available, but they are too expensive,” Kim said. “We decided to create a very cheap device using off-the-shelf components so that beekeepers can afford it.”
The research team is already working on the next phase, which is to develop automated hive climate controls that can be installed on hives and respond to EBV’s predictions, adjusting hive temperatures automatically.
“Right now, we can only issue warnings,” Hossain said. “But in the next phase, we are working on designing a system that can automatically heat or cool the hive when needed.”
The title of Hossain’s paper is “Principled Mining, Forecasting and Monitoring of Honeybee Time Series with EBV+” In addition to Hossain, Baer and Kim, the co-authors are Christos Faloutsos, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Vassilis Tsotras, professor of computer science and engineering at UCR.
All the authors are with UCR’s Center for Integrative Bee Research, one of the largest pollinator health research hubs in the nation.
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Principled Mining, Forecasting and Monitoring of Honeybee Time Series with EBV+
Article Publication Date
24-Feb-2025
Virginia Tech study reveals that honeybee dance ‘styles’ sway food foraging success
Researchers in the Department of Entomology found that the secret to the bees’ success in food gathering is all in the "waggle."
image:
A honeybee doing the waggle dance to entice her sisters to a tasty food source.
view moreCredit: Photo by Roger Schürch for Virginia Tech.
As far as animals go, honeybees are world-class dancers.
While not as deep and complex as a Super Bowl half-time show, the bees' moves, known as the “waggle" dance, convey very specific food foraging instructions to their nestmates. The direction the dancer moves explains to other bees which way to go, and the duration of the waggle dance, or the “run,” shows how far to go. Once other bees have been convinced to follow the directions, they are “recruited.” After receiving the instructions, these recruits leave the hive to find the food their sisters were so excited about.
Unfortunately, many of these recruited bees do not always successfully find the food they set out in search of. Margaret Couvillon, associate professor in the Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and her former Ph.D. student Laura McHenry wanted to find out why.
Trying to understand why waggle dances fail
Honeybees have had millions of years to perfect the waggle dance, so it may be surprising to learn that it doesn’t often work. Even though it was first described by scientists over 80 years ago, there is still a lot about the waggle dance that we don’t understand.
Couvillon has learned several interesting patterns related to this form of communication. One such observation was that bees have consistent, unique ways of dancing, meaning each bee has its own “style” that it adds to the communication. Could the success of the waggle dance be related to this uniqueness? Would bees that communicated similarly yield more successful recruits? Or is there some other factor at play? This study reveals the waggle to be a diverse form of communication that helps improve the likelihood that one bee can tell another where food can be found. The findings were recently published in Current Biology.
“Although the waggle dance itself is fascinating, my lab has additionally been intrigued about waggle dance miscommunication, or the hows and whys behind the failure of the dance recruitment,” Couvillon said.
To answer these questions, the Couvillon Lab devised an experiment utilizing clear-walled hives, video cameras, and a method of tagging bees so they could be tracked as individuals when they foraged and danced. Each hive included foragers who had been taught the location of an artificial food source. These trained foragers performed a waggle dance to teach others where this food was, effectively training a new set of recruits. If successful in locating the food, these recruits returned to teach other bees what they learned. Couvillon and her team hypothesized that bees with similar dance styles would more often successfully teach others how to find the food and communication that differed between bees would be less successful.
Whenever a new, tagged bee was observed at the food source, video of the hive was reviewed to determine which dancer had recruited that successful forager. This pattern of data collection allowed the researchers to track the dance the bees used, with each bee learning where the food was located from a slightly different telling. These successful dances were then compiled, and the run of each dance was measured and compared to the earlier dances. The pattern that emerged was not what the researchers expected.
The power of individuality
Based on the data from these dances, Couvillon and McHenry found that similar dance communication did not actually result in the most successful foraging, which was their original hypothesis. Dances that had a longer run, effectively telling the recruits to overshoot the food source, were more successful than dances describing similar, more accurate, distances. This pattern suggested that the “overshooting” instructions may have led to additional opportunities to find the food, once on the way past the food source and again on the way back to the hive. They theorized that the foragers having a second chance to find the food source increased the chance that they find it at all.
What does this mean for understanding the honeybee waggle dance? One takeaway is the importance of these unique communication styles, where individual dance mannerisms enhance communication success. If every bee communicated the same, the likelihood of foragers reaching the food would decrease as compared to having a diverse set of styles.
This study adds effective dance moves to the list of known benefits of individuality, showing that a diverse set of communication skills helps improve the likelihood that one bee can tell another where food can be found, all through dance.
“We’ve known for a while that behavioral and genetic diversity benefit honeybees, allowing for superior thermoregulation, disease resistance, growth, and foraging,” said Couvillon. “Now we have also seen that diverse communication enhances recruitment success.”
The paper, “Individuality impacts communication success in honey bees,” was published in Current Biology. Couvillon’s research was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech.
A Virginia Tech entomologist marking an individual honeybee so that researchers can match when the bee visits a feeder to the corresponding waggle dance it does for its nestmates.
Credit
Photo by Roger Schürch for Virginia Tech.
Article Title
Individuality impacts communication success in honey bees
Article Publication Date
24-Feb-2025
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