Our friends, the bees, have certain unhealthy behaviors for the hive that frighten passers-by. A behavior, swarm, happens when a hive splits naturally with a group of bees following a new queen. This is a delicate time for the hive and can cause the death of bees and a dead queen. In other words, it’s bad.
A beekeeper, Herbert M. Aumann, has a solution. Its system is a small vibrational and motion sensor that attaches to the outside of a hive and transmits data about the behavior of bees. Beekeepers are able to split hives before the swarm begins, so this system uses both sensors to capture behavior before it cascades.
“This sensor is connected to the outside of a hive, near the hive entrance,” Aumann wrote in study at IEEE Sensors Letters. “The outdoor sensor is a 24 GHz continuous wave Doppler radar to monitor the flight activity of bees. The indoor sensor is a piezoelectric transducer. Unlike a conventional microphone that captures the sounds produced by bees, the piezoelectric transducer captures the incidental vibrations transmitted by the activity of bees to the structure of the hive.
The system then calculates the probability of a swarm and warns the beekeeper so that he can keep his small yellow and black loads safe. When bees gather before a swarm event, the sensor will detect the vibrations of the event, which will allow the beekeeper to stop the activity by modifying the hive box enough to hold the bees in place. The sensor can also notify the beekeeper of theft events when bees outside a hive seize an entire hive and steal honey from weaker bees.
“Because I had spent my career building radar systems to track small targets, I thought I could use a low-power radar to observe bees ten feet away. In fact, I could,” Aumann said. Spectrum. “Surprisingly, the signals that the radar picked up could turn into an acoustic signal that sounded exactly the same as the signal you would hear next to the hive.”
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He has built a startup, MaineBiosensors, to produce these electronic devices for beekeepers who want to keep their little honey-making friends healthy and happy. He still doesn’t sell them, but expects to have consumption models soon.