SENSORBEES

SENSORBEES 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 behaviour, 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.

Coordinator
Tomáš Krajník
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Czech Technical University in Prague
Karlovo náměstí 13
120 00 Praha
Czech Republic
email: tomas (dot) krajnik (at) fel (dot) cvut (dot) cz
https://chronorobotics.fel.cvut.cz/people/tomas-krajnik