Project Details
Description
Horticulture Innovation Request for Proposal PH22003 Best practices for evaluation of bee health technology
Our objective is to improve the management of European Honeybees for pollination, through a thorough evaluation of current and emerging technologies that assess honey bee hive quality and condition and reporting of findings and recommendations back to beekeepers.
The marketplace is currently busy with gadgets claiming to provide information on hive health, but for all these devices there are questions about data quality and reliability, and how the given data should be interpreted as a meaningful signal of hive condition. There are three parts to this project.
1)Test of health predictions from available commercial remote assessment tools against in-depth manual assessments of hive health (including direct measurements of bee population and benchmark of commercial tools against state-of-the-art lab grade equipment).
There are two main classes of hive monitoring technology: scale based technologies that report hive weight and in-hive temperature and/or humidity sensors. Various companies offer different products, and what is available on the market changes quickly.
Our research over the last eight years has developed and evaluated a range of sensors to assess honey bee and hive health and performance. For example, we now know how to estimate the number of forager bees in a colony, and the success of the foragers in gathering resources for the colony from small changes in hive weight measured at minute intervals across the day. We understand how to interpret changes in hive health from changes in temperature in the colony. We know how to assess the performance of forager bees using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track their movements in and out of the hive.
In a research context we have developed the most precise and accurate sensors we can. These now give us a benchmark against which we can assess commercially available technologies marketed to beekeepers. In the research apiary at Macquarie University we will establish 16 colonies. 4 we will equip with our research sensors (ibutton in-hive temperature sensors, Tekfa scales and RFID). The remaining 12 colonies we will equip with commercially available sensors.
What is available on the market changes rapidly. In Australia currently available weight-based and temperature/humidity sensors are produced by Broodminder and Hivemind. In development but not yet available are similar technologies from LBAgtech, beeSTAR, hivemate and Apis Prime. At the time of writing the proposal we will focus on Broodminder and Hivemind, but we will incorporate in our studies other products should they become available. We will also watch the space and consider any new products that might emerge.
We will monitor hives continuously for 9 months. As well as the automatic sensors hives will be comprehensively surveyed every four weeks (using our published methods) to score numbers of bees and brood and amount of stored honey. We will also continuously monitor the climate in the bee yard with a weather station, which will allow us to consider changes in ambient temperature and humidity and rain in our analyses. With these additional data we can groundtruth the sensor data. This will give a comprehensive dataset on sensor performance. The benefits of the study are twofold. We will be able to report on the ulitity of commercially available products, and we will generate new information on how remote sensor data can best be analysed to deliver meaningful measures of hive condition.
2)Consultation of commercial beekeepers and growers to establish needs and expectations from remote hive health monitoring solutions. Redaction of improvements recommendations for the industry and establishment of product specifications to guarantee real outcomes for beekeepers from monitoring devices.
We will consult with commercial beekeepers to understand the needs and expectations of the industry and the challenges for deployment of sensor technologies. It is essential that industry be consulted to properly evaluate the cost/benefit analyses of any technology and the cost thresholds to economic viability. We expect that the requirements for assessing hive performance in a honey production context will be very different to the requirements for assessing performance in a pollination service context. Understanding how hives are spaced in bee yards and in cropping situations is necessary to model how many colonies and which colonies might need to be instrumented to capture and average condition of hives in that location. We will leverage our existing contexts with Horticulture Innovation, the Wheen Bee Foundation and regional beekeeper societies to visit the operations of apiculturalists during the key honey production and pollination periods. We will use national and regional bee keeper conferences to meet with apiculturalists and discuss their situation, needs and if possible arrange site visits.
3)Review of the monitoring literature and redaction of a technical document outlining the best practices to evaluate bee health technologies and cost-benefit analysis
With the findings from 1 and 2 we will develop a comprehensive technical document to recommended how sensor technologies can be used to assess bee hive condition and health, how data can be interpreted, how we might expect sensor information to improve hive monitoring and the economics of the technology. We will report our findings through specialist publications and also through regional and national bee keeper conferences.
Our objective is to improve the management of European Honeybees for pollination, through a thorough evaluation of current and emerging technologies that assess honey bee hive quality and condition and reporting of findings and recommendations back to beekeepers.
The marketplace is currently busy with gadgets claiming to provide information on hive health, but for all these devices there are questions about data quality and reliability, and how the given data should be interpreted as a meaningful signal of hive condition. There are three parts to this project.
1)Test of health predictions from available commercial remote assessment tools against in-depth manual assessments of hive health (including direct measurements of bee population and benchmark of commercial tools against state-of-the-art lab grade equipment).
There are two main classes of hive monitoring technology: scale based technologies that report hive weight and in-hive temperature and/or humidity sensors. Various companies offer different products, and what is available on the market changes quickly.
Our research over the last eight years has developed and evaluated a range of sensors to assess honey bee and hive health and performance. For example, we now know how to estimate the number of forager bees in a colony, and the success of the foragers in gathering resources for the colony from small changes in hive weight measured at minute intervals across the day. We understand how to interpret changes in hive health from changes in temperature in the colony. We know how to assess the performance of forager bees using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track their movements in and out of the hive.
In a research context we have developed the most precise and accurate sensors we can. These now give us a benchmark against which we can assess commercially available technologies marketed to beekeepers. In the research apiary at Macquarie University we will establish 16 colonies. 4 we will equip with our research sensors (ibutton in-hive temperature sensors, Tekfa scales and RFID). The remaining 12 colonies we will equip with commercially available sensors.
What is available on the market changes rapidly. In Australia currently available weight-based and temperature/humidity sensors are produced by Broodminder and Hivemind. In development but not yet available are similar technologies from LBAgtech, beeSTAR, hivemate and Apis Prime. At the time of writing the proposal we will focus on Broodminder and Hivemind, but we will incorporate in our studies other products should they become available. We will also watch the space and consider any new products that might emerge.
We will monitor hives continuously for 9 months. As well as the automatic sensors hives will be comprehensively surveyed every four weeks (using our published methods) to score numbers of bees and brood and amount of stored honey. We will also continuously monitor the climate in the bee yard with a weather station, which will allow us to consider changes in ambient temperature and humidity and rain in our analyses. With these additional data we can groundtruth the sensor data. This will give a comprehensive dataset on sensor performance. The benefits of the study are twofold. We will be able to report on the ulitity of commercially available products, and we will generate new information on how remote sensor data can best be analysed to deliver meaningful measures of hive condition.
2)Consultation of commercial beekeepers and growers to establish needs and expectations from remote hive health monitoring solutions. Redaction of improvements recommendations for the industry and establishment of product specifications to guarantee real outcomes for beekeepers from monitoring devices.
We will consult with commercial beekeepers to understand the needs and expectations of the industry and the challenges for deployment of sensor technologies. It is essential that industry be consulted to properly evaluate the cost/benefit analyses of any technology and the cost thresholds to economic viability. We expect that the requirements for assessing hive performance in a honey production context will be very different to the requirements for assessing performance in a pollination service context. Understanding how hives are spaced in bee yards and in cropping situations is necessary to model how many colonies and which colonies might need to be instrumented to capture and average condition of hives in that location. We will leverage our existing contexts with Horticulture Innovation, the Wheen Bee Foundation and regional beekeeper societies to visit the operations of apiculturalists during the key honey production and pollination periods. We will use national and regional bee keeper conferences to meet with apiculturalists and discuss their situation, needs and if possible arrange site visits.
3)Review of the monitoring literature and redaction of a technical document outlining the best practices to evaluate bee health technologies and cost-benefit analysis
With the findings from 1 and 2 we will develop a comprehensive technical document to recommended how sensor technologies can be used to assess bee hive condition and health, how data can be interpreted, how we might expect sensor information to improve hive monitoring and the economics of the technology. We will report our findings through specialist publications and also through regional and national bee keeper conferences.
| Short title | Bee health tech |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Effective start/end date | 1/05/23 → 31/10/26 |