Listening to your bees

19th April 2012 Sutton Coldfield Bee Keepers Lecture

The lecture was held by Martin Bencsik, an academic from Nottingham Trent University

Martin's father is the bee keeper and Martin has been working on listening to two hives using an accelerometer.  He explained and gave examples of animals and young children communicating with owners and parents through sound. The dogs howling when left outside shops and toddlers laughing when happy.

He described the device he has been working on as a non invasive diagnostic monitoring tool. He explained some basic physics like all solid objects vibrate. Bee hives vibrate and make a noise. Axel Michelsen discovered this some time ago and he also discovered the waggle dance.

Bee wings vibrate at 250 Hertz which is a very low frequency and the waggle dance is performed at 76 Hertz.

Martin also told us that bee's were busy at all times of the day and night. Even at midnight the bees are busy within the hive. However he wanted to listen to individual conversations and this was called the cocktail party problem a mathematical called Karl Pearson had previously looked at this problem, of ignoring lots of conversations at a dinner party and listening only to one converstation. He came up with a principal component analysis theory , which Martin has been using to listen to individual conversations. Using that technique he has been able to identify six statistically independent activities/converstations. However he still doesn't know what these six different conversations are about.

During his research 1 swarm event was physically observed and the swarm produced so much noise in the hive that it silenced all the other conversations. The data that the sound produced means that Martin is confident that he can identify when a swarm has occurred. You could see the noise alter upto 10 days prior to the swarm leaving. The noise that occurred prior to the swarm was only found in the swarming session. He can see from the data he had a couple of other swarms however these weren't physically observed by a person so could not be verified.

In autumn he also noticed a distinct change in sound when the varroa treatment Apistan was applied. Possible the message to clean up the hive because of the chemical used within Apistan.

Short term Martin has plans to develop a device which will retail at about £30 and long term he wanted to develop a device that check the health of your bees alerts you when they are likely to swarm via email or sms and when they actually do swarm. He wants to be able to inform you your hive is queen less or are hungry or even if the hive has a varroa infestation, or a nosema infestation. Thus reducing the need to visit your hive. Ideally the cost per device will eventually be down to less than £10. He has promised memebers of the Sutton branch will be given one as part of the testing phase.

Most of Martins work is based in France and the National Bee Unit based in York is interested, as are the European Union who have funded his research.

It was an interesting talk.