Accelerometer to Detect Bee Swarming

Bee keepers are often troubled by swarming, when the queen bee leaves her old hive and leaves only the weak bees behind, taking the stronger ones with her to a new hive.

This event can be prevented by building a new hive close by as a lure for the departing bees to live in. The accelerometer used in smart phones has been used by a research team led by Martin Bencsik at the Nottingham Trent University to listen and track movements of the bees. The sensor was located inside a hive and linked to a computer to track the movements of the bees for more than five months. For this, the computer was programmed to learn the language of the bees buzzing inside the hive.

The most activity or buzzing that causes vibration in the hive takes places in the early hours of the morning. It was also discovered that ten days prior to swarming, a different kind of vibration starts to lace the hive, warning of a potential exodus. Research will continue to find out if each hive has a different language, in which case the computer would have to understand the language of each one to provide accurate warnings.