How to Build an Electronic Bee Counter

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42 points·sohkamyung··6 comments

Cool! Bees really are fascinating. It'd be especially neat, if like they say, they are also able to determine pollen etc. with their system.

I found the following really amazing too:

Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees - http://www.efn.uncor.edu/departamentos/divbioeco/entomo/Scie...

Using radar to track honey bees - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23448846

I was really hoping they would tackle the harder problem of dealing with a production hive. Temperature and weight are fairly easy to monitor, but knowing activity would be useful in tracking hive health.

Oh, well, maybe a project for this summer.

This setup is impressive, but perhaps overly complex. I have the feeling that it would be far simpler to set up a webcam and use computer vision techniques to monitor activity at each entry point.

True, if you are only interested in bees entering and leaving. But as the article says, they are also interested in learning what is inside and for that, vision techniques may not be as useful.

Quote from the article: "Although we’ve only just begun distilling the data, we believe it should be possible to determine not just the volume of material added to each cell but also details about the types of material involved (mud, eggs, pollen, and so on)."

My CS department had quite a few bee hobbyists. A friend of mine did a MS thesis on tracking bees with computer vision... it's quite a bit more challenging than you might initially suspect. One professor was working on a capacitive system for tracking honeybees, but AFAIK has not had success with it.

Very interesting! I've been pondering what could be an effective way to gather different statistics on an active hive. Does anyone know of any projects or links worth checking out?

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