Innovation allows for remote monitoring of beehive health.
Innovation allows for remote monitoring of beehive health.
A UC Riverside computer science team has developed a sensor-based technology that could revolutionize commercial beekeeping by reducing colony losses and lowering labor costs.
Called the Electronic Bee-Veterinarian, or EBV, the technology uses low-cost heat sensors and forecasting models to predict when hive temperatures may reach dangerous levels. The system provides 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 stressors.
“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,” said Shamima Hossain, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UCR and lead author of a paper explaining the technology.
Read more at University of California - Riverside
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