I have a somewhat unique experience and background in healthcare as a medical robotics engineer. I help doctors treat patients remotely, through robots.
So I started trying to make a robotic assistant for beekeepers. (As you would).
What a glamorous robot: See it
I needed to teach the robot how to see bees
In the real world, bees live outside, this meant putting a laptop in a bucket pointed at a beehive.
Even more glamorous.
I taught bucket-bot to see and count bees, it measures how many flying bees there are in front of the hive as “bees per second”
The bot was able to watch the beehive all day every day, and we graphed the data.
The robot’s computer vision captured something special
We discovered this bee flight activity pattern.
You can see there’s a giant spike!
No one had noticed this before.
Nobody had measured it before.
It’s the collective flight activity pattern of the beehive superorganism.
And it turns out every healthy beehive has this spike, regularly.
This is the heartbeat of a beehive.
Using data and computer vision is wildly different to how we check bee health today. Traditionally Beekeepers check bee health by opening their hives every few weeks.
We aim to see evidence of a healthy queen bee, how well the colony is managing pests and disease, and if the bees have enough food.
By using technology we can monitor the hive’s vitals, without doing the open hive surgery. We’re only messing with their home when we have a good reason, disturbing the bees less, and leaving them bee.