Bees are critical to the livelihood of our ecosystem, but unfortunately in the past decade, bee populations have decreased by 30% [1]. In addition to the ecological impact, this instability poses an economic threat to the commercial honey bee pollination industry, which is valued at over $10 billion annually in the U.S. alone [2]. Much of the decline is attributed to a complicated phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which results in the hive’s rapid abandonment of their queen, but the causes of CCD are not well understood. Whether you are an individual hobbyist or a commercial farmer who relies on large-scale pollination, monitoring your hive with simple sensory data can help beekeepers detect problematic trends in colony health. Our project, known as “LongHive”, is a full-service infrastructure for beehive maintenance, enabled by the Helium Network and Deep Learning (DL). Data-driven beekeepers can install our LongHive system, which fits underneath standard beehives and includes a suite of relevant sensors, a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) for classifying the hive’s acoustic signatures, and a web-based dashboard for easy visualization of the transient signals.
An interesting link found among my daily reading
