Electronic Bee-Veterinarian helps maintain healthy hives

Developed by a team at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), the  Electronic Bee-Veterinarian (EBV) uses low-cost heat sensors and forecasting models to predict when beehive temperatures may reach dangerous levels.

The system is said to provide remote beekeepers with early warnings, allowing them to take preventive action before their colonies collapse during extreme hot or cold weather or when the bees cannot regulate their hive temperature because of disease, pesticide exposure, food shortages, or other factors.  The work is detailed in ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data.

In a statement, lead author Shamima Hossain, a PhD student in computer science at UCR, said: “We convert the temperature to a factor that we are calling the health factor, which gives an estimate of how strong the bees are on a scale from zero to one.”

This metric, with a score of ‘one' indicating the bees are at full strength, allows beekeepers unfamiliar with the underlying model to assess hive health quickly.