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A brief electronic chime signals that Professor Dirk de Graaf has received a notification on his smartphone. It’s a message from the beleaguered hive.
De Graaf, professor of biomedicine and insect physiology at Ghent University in Belgium and director of the Molecular Entomology and Poultry Pathology Laboratory, has spent the past five years developing a system for collecting hive data that will significantly improve survival rates.
Smart Hive
Within the project B-GOODa Europe-wide research initiative funded by the European Union, saw de Graaf and a team of researchers from 13 European countries join forces between mid-2019 and November last year to investigate how new technologies can help support the health of bees and the sustainability of beekeeping.
Researchers have designed a monitoring system that can identify problems in beehives and provide beekeepers with customized recommendations on how to intervene. The system could become an important ally for farmers, who are expected to see an increase in beekeeping by 2021. I-u It is 615,000.
They developed a digital honeycomb: a thin printed circuit board with various sensors, around which the bees build their hive. When several such boards are placed in a hive, they send data to the researchers and enable real-time monitoring.
The next step is to figure out how to interpret the data. “The key challenge is to find out which parameters have the greatest impact on the health of the hive,” De Graaf said.
Over three seasons, a team of scientists monitored nearly 400 bee colonies in 13 participating countries, which allowed them to create algorithms to help interpret the data they collected with the help of digital clocks.
“It turns out that weight is a good indicator of whether a colony will survive the winter,” DeGraaf said. “With our technology, we can now pinpoint which communities need intervention. We then inform the sellers of this through customized notifications with specific instructions.”
Technology and poultry farming
Bees are a key species for the pollination of wild plants and many cultivated food crops, including chocolate, coffee, tomatoes and blueberries. It is estimated that around four-fifths of the agricultural and wild plant species that thrive in Europe depend at least to some extent on pollinators.
However, wild pollinator populations are declining dramatically across Europe and around the world due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss and widespread pesticide use. European Red List About a third of all bee, butterfly and wasp populations are threatened. De Graaf believes pesticides are particularly harmful.
“Many times, bees don’t die immediately after being exposed to pesticides, but instead develop memory problems and eventually fail to return to the hive,” DeGraaf said.
Some, mainly young people, who are more technologically savvy and on a larger scale… use automated data collection from hives. The goal now is to promote the use of these tools to the entire beekeeper community, which will make data collection possible on a larger scale. To this end, the researchers are working closely with the initiative EU Bee Partnershipan EU-wide platform dealing with animal health and data management, was launched in 2017.
“If more people relied on this technology, it would bring about a complete revolution. We could look at bird health in a different light,” De Graaf said.
The technology they developed may be able to help beekeepers plan future hives. Scientists on the B-GOOD project used the data to create virtual landscapes that predict how hives will respond to certain environmental conditions. “It’s like a flight simulator for pilots,” he said.
Continued funding from the EU will enable researchers in the B-GOOD project to continue their valuable work within the research programme. BETTER-B It will last until May 2027.
View from the inside
Thomas Schmickl, professor of zoology at the University of Graz in Austria, has also spent the past five years investigating how the latest technology can be used to support the health of bees as part of another EU-funded research project called Bee Health. In HIV Citywhich lasted from 2019 to August this year.
Schmickel founded it… The Artificial Life Lab (ALL, from Eng. Artificial Life Lab) at the University of Graz is an international laboratory for interdisciplinary research in the fields of biologically inspired collective intelligence, self-organization, swarm robotics and algorithms.
Much of ALL’s work is based on inspiration from nature, which is used for new ideas in robotics. As part of the HIVEOPOLIS project, the researchers are turning that concept around and looking at how advances in robotics can help support nature. Schmickel calls this concept By invading the ecosystem.
“Bees are very powerful. If you support them, you support the entire environment around them,” Schmickel said. “Pollination can only happen in Para.”
Likewise, reduced insect pollination leads to lower crop yields, which in turn causes higher food prices. This forces farmers to adopt intensive agricultural methods that are harmful to the environment, causing insect populations to decline further. It’s a vicious cycle.
Like the team of scientists who worked on the B-GOOD study, the researchers on the HIVEOPOLIS project have developed a digital bag equipped with sensors. By measuring the temperature at different points inside the hive, the researchers can successfully determine what is happening inside the hive.
This enables a beekeeper to find out, for example, where a nest of bees is located in a hive. The beekeeper can then open the hive without disturbing sensitive areas of brood.
Winter heating
But the HIVEOPOLIS project’s digital clocks are not only sensors, they can also be activated to heat up certain parts of the hive, which Schmickel claims can dramatically affect survival rates.
“Many bee colonies die in the winter,” he said. “They need honey to survive, but sometimes they can’t get to the honey stores, so the bees freeze to death when they try to get to them.” By helping them retain heat during the winter, beekeepers can increase the survival rate of their colonies.
“Now, for the first time, we can change the temperature inside a hive by sending that command directly over the internet. No one has ever done this before,” he said.
At first, it was unclear how they would react to the technology. However, experiments have shown that bee colonies respond positively and their collective intelligence responds to temperature changes by reducing the heat generated by the bees themselves, which helps them save energy.
He splashed flowers
Inspired by the work of Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch, the scientists of the HIVEOPOLIS project also investigated the possibility of communicating with bees in a particularly novel way.
In 1973, von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for his work deciphering bird dances that communicate the location of food sources.
He thinks the combination of the angle to the hive, the formation of the dance, and the speed at which the plug moves indicates the direction and distance of the food source. This type of motor communication appears to be unique in the insect world, and the research is intriguing.
Dr. Tim Landgraf, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, one of the partners in the HIVEOPOLIS project, continues his research based on Early workThe work included the development of a robotic dancing bee called RoboBee and showed for the first time that bees might be willing to follow digital companions.
As part of the HIVEOPOLIS project, Landgraf’s research lab designed a system to observe the dances of real bees and transfer these dances to a map so that they can be analyzed more closely.
Eventually, scientists on the HIVEOPOLIS project believe that robots like this could guide bees to safe foraging sites and away from dangerous areas, such as those contaminated by pesticides or disease. But first they want to better understand the dance itself.
Schmickel said he hopes farmers will take advantage of the research. “We have the prototype, now the free market needs to use these techniques on a larger scale.”
By Sophia Strode
The research in this article was funded by the European Union’s Horizon Programme (including the HIVEOPOLIS project) and the European Innovation Council (EIC). The views of the interlocutors do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission.
More information:
B-GOOD Project
HIVEOPOLIS Project
This is the first time
EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2030.
This article was originally published in č magazine horizonEU Journal of Research and Innovation.
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