SENSORBEES aims to use honeybee colonies as a sensor network for tracking important but undersampled ecological key metrics: 1) the level of pollination service in the surrounding region and 2) the level of diversity of blossoming plants. The pollination of plants is essential not only for human society in agriculture but also for the trophic basis of the food webs that support all the other trophic layers of animals that are currently endangered in the ongoing sixth mass extinction. We will equip a conventional beehive with technology capable of monitoring the queen, worker bees, the brood, and their mutual interactions. By monitoring the activity and payload of the bees at the hive entrance, our system provides information about the health of the colony as well as on the diversity of plants within the foraging area of the bees, up to 10 km around the hive, thus sample areas of 314 sq km. Estimations of colony health and pest infestation levels can be made by looking for anomalies in overall behavior, brood growth, breeding success, and resource fluctuations and comparing these to the data streams from the hive entrance and local weather data. Data fusion will be applied to several colonies, e.g., to locate potential problematic feeding sites in the surrounding ecosystem.Â
A general overview of the project concept
Monitoring the combs to read the surrounding environment
My research in the EU-FET project RoboSensorBees is in cooperation with the following international and interdisciplinary partners: Prof. Farshad Arvin (University of Manchester, UK, coordinator), Prof. Tomas Krajnik (Czech Technical University, Prague) and Prof. Donato Romano (Scuola Superiore Di Sant'Anna, Pontedera, Italy).