Large-scale multi-parameter analysis of honeybee behavior in their natural habitat

The goal of this project is to develop a new approach for the integrated analysis of bee activities enabling the observation and understanding of individual variations of behavior at multiple time-scales and according to multiple parameters.

See overview here: Flyer_BigDBee_2019

Project Vision:
This work is based on the video and sensor monitoring of bee colonies, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Version 2 of the data collection system. (A) Overview of the Bee colony equipped with video capture. (B) Close-up on the entrance ramp.

Bees are individually tagged using small lightweight waterproof barcodes to be able to identify and track each single bee over its foraging lifespan. Videos and sensor data is collected and later annotated to obtain the behavior or a large number of individual bees over extended periods of time.

 

Figure 2: Left: Web application « labelBee » used to visualize and annotate behavior events of the bees (foraging trips, presence of pollen, fanning behavior…) . Tagged bees can be identified and tracked. A chronogram provides an overview of the behavior patterns of the bees. Right: example of detection of pollen to differentiate foraging specialization for the bees returning to the colony.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1707355 and 1633184.