Researchers are using big data and smart technologies to improve conditions for bees and guide beekeepers.

Professor Dirk de Graaf receives an electronic “ping” on his smartphone, a message from a beehive that is in trouble.

De Graaf, a professor of biomedical physiology and insect physiology and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Entomology and Bee Pathology at Ghent University in Belgium, has spent the past five years developing a data collection system for bee hives that he hopes can significantly improve survival rates.

Intelligent beehives

As part of a Europe-wide research initiative, the B-GOOD project, de Graaf and a team of researchers from 13 European countries joined forces between mid-2019 and November last year to explore how new technologies can support both bee health and the sustainability of beekeeping.

The researchers have developed a monitoring system that can detect problems in a hive and provide the beekeeper with tailored advice on how to intervene. This system is a potentially crucial ally for beekeepers, of which there were an estimated 615,000 in the EU in 2021.

They developed a digital honeycomb – a thin circuit board with various sensors around which the bees build their honeycombs. Several of these honeycombs in each hive can then transmit data to the researchers, enabling real-time monitoring.

The next step was to figure out how best to interpret the data. “The challenge was to figure out which parameters contribute most to the health of a colony,” said de Graaf.

Over three seasons, the team monitored nearly 400 colonies in the 13 participating countries, allowing them to develop algorithms to help interpret the data collected from the digital honeycombs.

“Weight has been shown to be a good indicator of whether a colony will survive the winter,” said de Graaf. “With our technology, we can now identify colonies that require intervention. This is then communicated to beekeepers via tailored alerts with specific instructions.”

Tech-savvy beekeeping

Bees are a keystone species and are essential for the pollination of wild plants and many crops, including chocolate, coffee, tomatoes and blueberries. It is estimated that around four out of five crop and wild plant species in Europe depend at least partly on insect pollination.

But the number of wild pollinators in Europe and the world is declining rapidly due to the combined effects of climate change, habitat loss and widespread pesticide use. According to the European Red List, the population of around one in three bee, butterfly and hoverfly species is threatened. For de Graaf, the effects of pesticides are particularly damaging.

“Very often, bees do not die immediately when exposed to pesticides, but they develop memory problems and eventually do not return to their hive,” said de Graaf.

Some beekeepers, especially younger and more tech-savvy beekeepers, are already using automatic data collection from hives. The aim now is to promote the use of these tools across the beekeeping community to enable data collection on a larger scale. To this end, the researchers are working closely with the EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide platform for bee health and data management established in 2017.

“If more beekeepers relied on it, it would be a game changer; it would help us look at bee health from a different perspective,” said de Graaf.

The technology developed could also help beekeepers plan future hives. The B-GOOD team has used the data to create virtual landscapes that predict how a hive will respond to certain environmental conditions. “It works a bit like a flight simulator, but for beekeepers,” said de Graaf.

Thanks to ongoing EU funding, B-GOOD researchers can continue their valuable work within the BETTER-B research initiative, which will run until May 2027.

Interior view

Professor Thomas Schmickl, Professor of Zoology at the University of Graz in Austria, has also been researching the use of cutting-edge technology to support honey bee health over the past five years as part of another research initiative called HIVEOPOLIS, which ran from 2019 to March this year.

Schmickl is the founder of the Artificial Life Lab (ALL) at the University of Graz, an international, interdisciplinary research laboratory that conducts research in the areas of swarm intelligence, self-organization, swarm robotics and biologically inspired algorithms.

Much of the work at ALL is based on taking inspiration from nature to make advances in robotics. At HIVEOPOLIS, researchers are turning this notion around and instead exploring how advances in robotics could help support nature. Schmickl calls this concept “ecosystem hacking.”

“Honey bees are extremely efficient. Those who support them also support the environment around them,” says Schmickl. “Pollination can only be maintained with the help of the bees.”

He points out that when there are fewer insects to pollinate, farmers’ crop yields fall, which in turn leads to rising food prices. This in turn puts pressure on farmers to use intensive, environmentally damaging farming methods that lead to a further decline in insect populations. It’s a vicious cycle.

Like the B-GOOD team, HIVEOPOLIS researchers have developed a digital honeycomb equipped with sensors. By measuring temperatures at different points in the hive, researchers can effectively map what is happening inside.

This makes it possible, for example, to determine where the brood is in the hive, the so-called brood nest. The beekeeper can then open the hive without disturbing the sensitive area of ​​the brood nest.

Keep warm

But HIVEOPOLIS’ digital honeycombs are not just sensors; they can also be activated to heat certain parts of a hive, which Schmickl says could significantly increase survival rates.

“Many bee colonies die in the winter,” he said. “They need honey to survive, but sometimes these stores are out of reach, so the bees die of cold trying to reach them.” By making sure bees stay warm in the winter, beekeepers can increase colony survival rates.

“This is the first time we can change the temperature inside the honeycomb by sending the command directly over the Internet. No one has ever done this before,” he said.

Initially, it was unclear how the bees would react to the technology. However, experiments have confirmed that not only did the colonies respond positively, but the swarm intelligence responds to the temperature changes by reducing the bees’ own heat production and helping them to conserve energy.

Dancing bees

Inspired by the work of Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch, the HIVEOPOLIS team also investigated the potential to communicate with bees in a particularly original way.

In 1973, von Frisch received the Nobel Prize for his work in deciphering the waggle dance of honey bees – a dance with which bees communicate the location of food sources.

He postulated that the angle to the hive, the shape of the dance and the speed of the waggle movement together indicate the direction and distance of the food source. This type of communication through movement seems to be unique in the insect world and fascinates researchers.

Dr. Tim Landgraf, Professor for Artificial and Collective Intelligence at the Free University of Berlin, one of the partners of HIVEOPOLIS, expanded on his previous work on the development of a dancing robot bee called RoboBee and provided initial evidence that bees may be willing to follow the example of a digital partner.

With HIVEOPOLIS, Landgraf’s research laboratory has developed a system that allows real honey bee dances to be observed and transferred to a map for more detailed analysis.

The HIVEOPOLIS team believes that such a robot could potentially guide honey 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.

Schmickl expressed the hope that the work done will benefit beekeepers: “We have the prototypes, now it is up to the free market to use these technologies on a larger scale.”

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU research and innovation magazine.