There seems to be a bubble of bee threads now (notice I did not say “swarm”) and I would like to start another one.
I know that bees can be bought by the pound (i don’t know off-hand how many bees per pound there is); the queen comes in a separate little package.
How would you–with what technology–go about counting the members of a hive while they go about their tasks?
And even keeping track of them at successive times, perhaps to judge the health or swarming potential of the tribe, and definitely to account for the bees that were off-site during a previous census.
I’m sure this is an old problem in military avionics.
Bees have been barcoded before, and databased as to what bees went where and when from a specific hive. They had to go throught a tube that had a laser to read the code.
When I shoveled up the dead swarm I had about 3/4 cu ft of bees loosely packed I estimated about 50,000. maybe a bee keeper could give me a better estimate.
How accurate would you need to be? You can estimate the number of individuals in a swarm/flock/cloud etc by sampling a small area (look though a ring or tube or some such, then multiplying by the estimated number of times that region would fit into the whole. Sperm is counted something like this, I believe.
I’ve seen a conference talk about using LIDAR to monitor bees. I think the idea is to “teach” the bees to identify explosives by feeding them nectar with a trace of explosive material. Then using LIDAR to identify any areas in the field where the bees tend to spend extra time.
I think I see a problem. The tube counting method seems OK, but slow, and you must keep the counted bees locked up so they don’t get counted twice. So you must block exits. What about bees in the field? How long can the hive go w/o them? (Probably a long time, I guess.)
I prefer something hands-off, even though it was not in OP.
You take digital picture encompassing some area. The computer calls and identifies every black dot of a certain size. At the next time slice it measures displacement. If a new one comes in the field, it will be recognized as such.
I don’t know where I saw it, but the Israelis have a security system similar to that.
Dangit, scr4, I was going to mention LIDAR bee explosive detection! One of the folks working on the LIDAR end of the project was at Montana State, and he gave a colloquium on it.
Bees all come home at night, so that is the time to count them if you want. There are people who put their hives on scales, to judge the amount of stores the bees are bringing in, and that could probably be used to estimate the mass of bees in a hive.
You could count the bees as they come and go but that is only part of the picture. A lot of bees don’t leave the hive on a given day and a lot make multiple trips.
All of the estimates of number of bees I’ve seen involve estimating how many bees per frame, then multiplying by the number of frames in a hive.
I seem to remember seeing this on Nova on something similar.