Time for a new hive? The accelerometers that detect motion in smartphones have been turned into listening devices for predicting when a queen honeybee will desert her old hive, an event known as 鈥渟warming鈥�.
Swarming can be bad news for beekeepers. When a queen bee departs, she takes half the hive with her, leaving a weaker hive behind. With advance warning, it鈥檚 possible to set up a 鈥渂ait鈥� hive, to lure in the departing bees, but if the events are not managed properly, swarming can mean half the hive is lost entirely.
鈥榮 team at Nottingham Trent University, UK, embedded accelerometers into the back wall of two hives to detect the motion caused by the buzzing insects. They hooked their sensors up to a computer to monitor changes in the hives鈥� vibrations over five months.
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鈥淭he method relies on the computer learning the language of the buzzing hives,鈥� says Bencsik. The team found several signals in the vibrations 鈥� for instance, vibrations peak at sunrise 鈥� which could be used to monitor the health of a colony. Crucially, about 10 days before swarming, the hives produced a distinct vibration.
Others have tried to monitor hives using microphones without much success, but Bencsik鈥檚 device would be useful if he can prove it works on a large scale, says Tim Lovett of the British Beekeepers鈥� Association, which has considered developing a similar one that would automatically deliver an alert 鈥� by phone or email for instance 鈥� before a hive swarms.
Bencsik and his team now intend to expand the study. 鈥淲e want to see if each hive has its own language,鈥� he says, created by different hive structures, or bee species. The clincher would then be whether his computer program can learn each of these languages and deliver reliable alerts.
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