A WSN-based automatic monitoring system for the foraging behavior of honey bees and environmental factors of beehives

• An automatic WSN-based monitoring system was developed for monitoring honey bee behavior.
• The proposed system can detect both the environmental factors and foraging activities with a high temporal resolution.
• The proposed counting algorithm can accurately detect honey bees’ outgoing and incoming activities.
• Extensive experiments using the real beehives for examining the performance of the monitoring system were conducted.

The activity of a honey bee colony is heavily environmentally dependent. So, monitoring the colony activity should include the information of biological and physical factors both inside and outside of a beehive. However, using manual methods to simultaneously monitor the incoming and outgoing activities of a large amount of foragers and the environmental factors with high temporal resolution may cause drawbacks such as labor intensive and low accuracy. To cope with these difficulties, this study develops an automatic monitoring system for honey bee behavior based on wireless sensor network (WSN) technology. The monitoring system can be installed at the entrance of a beehive. The WSN-based monitoring system can not only detect the environmental factors both inside and outside the beehive, but also provide the long-term data of incoming and outgoing foraging activities of honey bees with a high temporal resolution. The results show that the average counting accuracy of incoming and outgoing behavior is 84.92% and 85.95%, respectively. Moreover, the long-term monitoring data that represent the frequencies of incoming and outgoing activities and the beehive related environmental factors are also analyzed. According to the data, honey bees become more energetic when the daily average ambient temperature is higher than 25 °C, and the average ambient relative humidity is between 60%RH and 70%RH. The experimental results show that the proposed monitoring system can reliably collect environmental data and the data related to the activities of honey bees simultaneously. This study also demonstrates that the proposed monitoring system is an excellent platform, which can be used to examine the relation between honey bees’ incoming and outgoing activities and environmental factors.