Identify swarming events
During a study conducted by Ferrari and colleagues (2008), an in-hive sound recording (microphone) of 270 h revealed, that the sound characteristics and temperature change at swarming events. While the sound intensity increased from a range of 100-300 Hz to 500-600 Hz, the temperature drops from 35 °C to 33 °C. [1] Bencsik and colleagues (2011) used accelerometers and its vibrational amplitudes to explore the swarming behavior of A. mellifera resulting in a correlation of data with occured swarming events. For further improvement of the study setup, they suggest to combine the used methods with a weather monitoring logging device and to use a pattern recognition algorithm that is more complex than the cross-correlation function used for their study. [2] In several other studies, microphones were used to sample audiodata, but Bencsik et al. suggest to not use them because of possible bias due to transient signals from passing bees and unwanted external noises and they also do not believe in a long-term monitoring with microphones. Another useful information to predict swarming events and to assess honey bee health problems is gaining knowledge about the particular brood cycle. In a further study by Bencsik et al. in 2015, a correlation between vibrational amplitude data and the brood cycle in a close range of the sensor was found. They further suggest, that the process of brood cycle monitoring could be conducted with only one hour measurements during the night. [3]
References
- ↑ Ferrari, S., Silva, M., Guarino, M., & Berckmans, D. (2008). Monitoring of swarming sounds in bee hives for early detection of the swarming period. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 64(1), 72–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2008.05.010
- ↑ Bencsik, M., Bencsik, J., Baxter, M., Lucian, A., Romieu, J., & Millet, M. (2011). Identification of the honey bee swarming process by analysing the time course of hive vibrations. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 76(1), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2011.01.004
- ↑ Bencsik, M., Le Conte, Y., Reyes, M., Pioz, M., Whittaker, D., Crauser, D., … Newton, M. I. (2015). Honeybee Colony Vibrational Measurements to Highlight the Brood Cycle. PloS One, 10(11), e0141926. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141926
