Could Smart Technology Help Save the World's Honey Bees? (cnn.com) 42
CNN Business reports:
Climate change, intensive agriculture, and the use of pesticides and fungicides in farming is ravaging the world's bees. Commercial beekeepers in the United States lost 44% of their managed colonies in 2019, according to research from the University of Maryland. Now, technology startups are developing smart devices that give beekeepers access to detailed information about the state of their hives, aiming to reduce losses and improve bee health.
Among them is Ireland's ApisProtect, which has just launched a sensor that alerts beekeepers if there is a problem in their hives. The small internet-connected sensor is placed under the roof of the beehive and measures a number of metrics including temperature, humidity, sound and movement. Data from the sensor is sent via the cloud to ApisProtect's HQ in Cork, Ireland, where the data is processed, analyzed and then sent back to the beekeeper...
With bees in demand for a booming pollination industry, there are a number of other startups promoting new technologies, including Pollenity in Bulgaria, Arnia in the United Kingdom and BeeHero in Israel.Pollenity was founded in 2015 by Sergey Petrov and has raised $1.2 million in funding. Its Beebot smart sensor device is aimed at small and hobbyist beekeepers, and it is also working with six universities from across Europe on an EU-funded research project called HIVEOPOLIS. The project aims to improve the welfare of bees by reinventing hives using a number of technologies, including a robot bee capable of "dancing" to direct the hive's swarm.
"The robot bee will tell the other bees where to go to find nectar and pollen," Petrov says. "Not only will this direct them to certain fields for pollination but also navigate the bees away from dangerous areas, like where pesticides are being used."
Among them is Ireland's ApisProtect, which has just launched a sensor that alerts beekeepers if there is a problem in their hives. The small internet-connected sensor is placed under the roof of the beehive and measures a number of metrics including temperature, humidity, sound and movement. Data from the sensor is sent via the cloud to ApisProtect's HQ in Cork, Ireland, where the data is processed, analyzed and then sent back to the beekeeper...
With bees in demand for a booming pollination industry, there are a number of other startups promoting new technologies, including Pollenity in Bulgaria, Arnia in the United Kingdom and BeeHero in Israel.Pollenity was founded in 2015 by Sergey Petrov and has raised $1.2 million in funding. Its Beebot smart sensor device is aimed at small and hobbyist beekeepers, and it is also working with six universities from across Europe on an EU-funded research project called HIVEOPOLIS. The project aims to improve the welfare of bees by reinventing hives using a number of technologies, including a robot bee capable of "dancing" to direct the hive's swarm.
"The robot bee will tell the other bees where to go to find nectar and pollen," Petrov says. "Not only will this direct them to certain fields for pollination but also navigate the bees away from dangerous areas, like where pesticides are being used."
How about we stop ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... f*cking up the environment with poison and bad agriculture instead of fiddling around with half-assed gadgetry and making a big fuss about how we use high tech token remedys to save the bees?
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Can't let the investment in Monsanto/Bayer go to waste, sorry.
how to make money by not doing things (Score:3)
its the final puzzle to creating advanced human civilization.
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... f*cking up the environment with poison and bad agriculture instead of fiddling around with half-assed gadgetry and making a big fuss about how we use high tech token remedys to save the bees?
Smarter people know that's never going to happen (because profit is king).
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And people smarter yet know that there are lots of healthy bees, and that bees who are left 1/3 of their own honey are much more resistant to disease, parasites, and poisons than bees that have all their honey taken away and replaced with corn syrup; something that is a gross violation of traditional beekeeping ethics.
Those traditional ethics are still practiced by many, and they have healthy bees. And there are wild bees that are even healthier.
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Begin by realizing there's no actual threat to the world's honey bees which they need to be saved from?
Let's start with the linked article:
So overall (-10.4% summer, +6.4% winter), losses o
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If you want to go back to 19th century agricultural practices then you should invest in a shovel company, because they'll only support a 19th century population level and you're going to have a lot of graves to dig.
every third mouthful... (Score:2)
Re:every third mouthful... (Score:4, Informative)
Bees are friggin' amazing animals. Particularly as a collective, but even as individuals.
I love how they always maintain an internal concept of the position of the sun as it moves over time (in order to be able to navigate to distant landmarks relative to it), regardless of latitude or time of year - how their brains basically calculate the proper motion of the sun under any circumstances. So when they waggle dance (up = direction of the sun; angles relative to that = the offset to fly; time per waggle = distance), the direction is relative to the sun's current position, not the position of the sun when they saw it last - and the listeners further adjust it for time delay when they fly out.
But then of course, you only have limited navigation precision when you're a tiny bee getting blown around and whatnot. So that gets them to a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters of a target. They then switch to visual navigation. And not simply instinctive visual navigation. They learn what sort of flower A) colours, and B) patterns are currently corresponding with good rewards in that particular area, and tend to focus on them; they have long-term memory. They also have techniques to avoid repeated visits to the same flower.
Inside the hive they're fastidiously clean animals, to the point that they'd rather die from dysentery than defecate in the hive, if bad weather keeps them inside for too long. Dead bees, pests, etc are all removed and dumped outside. Workers produce propolis to "caulk" cracks in their hive, but they don't over-seal it, as they want to maintain proper temperature and humidity. If there's a pest hiding in a part of the hive they can't get to, they'll try to seal them in with propolis. When they need more airflow to some part of the hive, workers will decide to dedicate themselves to functioning as living fans. And of course, the process of making honey itself is all about proper reduction of the water content of the regurgitated nectar (from - it should be noted - a structure that's more like a crop than a stomach; thinking of it as vomit really isn't correct).
It seems every time people assume they're dumb animals acting purely on instinct and unable to adapt to unexpected circumstances, they're proven wrong. One of my favourites was all of the experienced beekeepers commenting that, surely the Flow Hive couldn't work, because if you take the honey out of sealed cells, they'll be empty cells sealed with wax, and the bees would just keep assuming that they're stored honey. Except they don't - the bees are apparently able to tell somehow that the cells are empty, remove the wax, and start refilling them. Then again, this probably shouldn't be surprising, as bees have heavy evolutionary pressure to sense what's going on inside the comb, as there's all sorts of pests adapted to stealing honey or eating larvae, underneath the wax.
(It's a shame that bees are vulnerable to such a massive range of pests and diseases :( Humans spreading beekeeping around the world has unfortunately spread so many problems that used to be localized to only one specific place )
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They're one of the few animals who count discrete numbers, up to 5, and the only non-primate/non-ceteatan known to have a concept of zero. They can be trained to do fairly complex experiments, far beyond what the normal conception of an insect brain should be capable of.
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Other wasps are also pollinators, as well as many species of flies, moths and beetles. When our mint was in bloom a couple of weeks ago there were 5 species of bee, 3 species of flies, 2 species of wasps and a beetle all wandering around the flowers. I watched them for long enough that my wife started to worry where I was and came looking for me.
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My lunch, cheese sandwich, wheat and cheese from grass and corn fed cows, no bees needed. Manhattan clam chowder, clams, potatoes, carrots. No bees needed. There are vast areas of the US where no pesticides are used. There are even vaster areas of Russia where no pesticides are used. The same with Australia. If honey bees are so important poeople will pay the cost to import them.
If all you smart people would start organic farms we would not need all those poisons to feed people. I have pulled uncountable w
but what can the average person do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably planting more things that flower for the bees to eat is the easiest thing for most people to do.
Even NOT doing things can help. This summer after I mowed, the clover in my lawn bloomed, and I had large swaths of white patches in my yard. While my neighbors were running around mowing again to get rid of the white, I left the clover alone and saw quite a few bees in my yard.
Several variety of wildflowers volunteered on the side of my house, and I've let them grow, cultivated them a bit, and every time I'm on that side of the house I see mobs of bees and wasps all over the blooms. I'm not sure what exactly they are, but they're covered in a nonstop series of blossoms that aren't going to give up until the frost hits, they've been blooming for months. The bees absolutely LOVE them!
You can help the bees out quite a bit even with very little effort.
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When I lived in the US, I found it so bizarre how everyone insisted on having a lawn that was pure green, nothing but grass, and if any sort of flower of any kind dared show its face - dandelion, violet, clover, whatever - it was an atrocity and had to be immediately killed. And some people would even spray their lawns with chemicals to kill anything but grass. It boggled the mind. Who hates flowers? I mean, okay, sure, the tall dandelion seed stalks that emerge later look untidy, so when that happens,
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When I lived in the US, I found it so bizarre how everyone insisted on having a lawn that was pure green, nothing but grass, and if any sort of flower of any kind dared show its face - dandelion, violet, clover, whatever - it was an atrocity and had to be immediately killed.
That's because you don't know about Home Owners Associations (HOAs). In the USA you can actually be fined by them for not mowing your lawn enough.
(or even for growing grass that's the wrong shade of green).
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It's not just the HOAs, even city ordinances can be a problem. I've had a city truck stop by my house a few times to complain I am violating the "weed ordinance" by not keeping the grass in my BACK YARD cut short enough.... he wasn't there because he thought it was worth his time, he was there due to my neighbors complaining that they wanted me to mow my lawn more often... we (me and the city guy) compromised by agreeing to keep my lawn nice and short in about 1/2 the back yard, and let the other area gr
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My ultimate goal is to never have to mow again, so 2/3 of our yard is flower garden and much of the rest is vegetables. We've gotten notes from the city telling us to prune back the butterfly bushes, mulberry and fig different times because our neighbors complained. I've had more than one husband walking by jokingly say that I'm setting a "bad example" since now their wife wants them to plant gardens too.
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You were probably in the Midwest. When I went to Des Moines, Iowa, for work one time there was a detour on the way to the job site that took me through about three kilometers of neighborhoods, and I was appalled that in that entire stretch there were only two houses with anything like a flower garden. Here in Seattle you'll see at least three times that many in a single block.
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When I went to Des Moines, Iowa...
Spot on - Iowa City. Plus a couple other places.
Good to know it's not like that all over the US.
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This is white clover with the big white pompom flowers and white stripe inside the leaves. It blooms vigorously and the bees love it.
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I wanted to trim my hedge at the right time and went out to get started only to discover that it was invaded by bees because it had flowers in it. So I figured I'd might as well wait a week or two.
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I walk around the yard in the fall, poke holes in the grass and drop crocus bulbs in them. In the spring they come up and bloom, and I can put off mowing the first time for at least three weeks.
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You should plant mint (preferably somewhere you can control its spreading), or California lilac (not an actual lilac). The actual bee, wasp, fly, moth, butterfly and beetle population in your area will surprise you.
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I've got a close relative of that, catnip, growing wild all around my house now. Several years ago I pulled up a few catnip plants that had popped up in a patch of grass by my workplace, and planted it behind the house. It grows like mad around here now. thrives in sun or shade, which srurprised me a little bit. The plants in the front with the southern exposure got about 6ft high, absolutely covered with blossoms. I don't see a lot of honey/bumble bees on them, but plenty of wasps and other smaller in
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When you break it off and toss it put it somewhere covered, like a recycle bin or pile other stuff on top of it. The last generation of aphids will sense the flow of sap has stopped and give birth to ones with wings, and they'll fly somewhere else. Aphids are definitely weird, and like a lot of critters that are prey to almost everything they have amazing coping strategies.
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It's interesting seeing a flying aphid that's just started colonizing a new location. You find the winged mother in the middle of the underside of a leaf, surrounded by tiny (born-live) babies around her, starting to fan out.
Honey bees are not endangered (Score:5, Insightful)
Guys.
Honeybees are not endangered. Honeybees are about as endangered as cows are, which is to say that they are not anywhere close to being endangered.
There is a simple evolutionary law to understand: The single most successful evolutionary trait a living thing can have is being useful to humans. Honeybees are gonna be fine.
That said, the mistake that is made is that it's not honeybees that are endangered, it's basically EVERY OTHER SPECIES of insect, especially wild bees. We have seen population collapses in many species of wild insects including pollinators. Honeybees are not the most important pollinators to be concerned about.
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Quite true. Anyone who wants to can order queens online. There's techniques to encourage hives to produce hundreds of them. A single queen with a handful of workers can start a new hive. They're not going anywhere.
The increased rate of winner colony loss (note: winter colony loss is normal, it's just a higher ratio in some recent years, and sometimes associated with some different types of symptoms) isn't a threat to bee survival. But it is an economic penalty to beekeepers, which translates to, yes, hig
To add to this (Score:2)
betteridges law of headlines (Score:4, Insightful)
says no.
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They almost fooled you this time. Turns out the honey bees don't even need saving, any more than cows do. They're farm animals with a population of hives still near the historical record high set a few years ago.
So the question itself is wrong, meaning that the answer is in fact "no", because no one can save the honey bees when there is nothing to save them from.
Robot bee (Score:3)
Well, I can already see some weaknesses. Which is that first off, bees tend to ignore other bees' waggle dances if they're already happy with how their foraging is going, and they may even waste time "arguing" with other bees if they disagree about the "advice" they're giving (there's a certain frequency buzz which amounts to shouting "NO!", and they can even get in outright fights about it). E.g. if a bee found little forage in the aforementioned location, or a predator, or a dead bee, or whatnot, it tries to keep other bees from getting directed to that location.
Also, even bees that aren't having much foraging success don't always listen to a bee giving a waggle dance (although they're more likely too). And of course, waggle dancing on the comb has a limited range over which bees can "see" (actually, electrostatically-feel) the dance. Basically, a robot waggler may direct some bees to a particular field, and some bees away from a pesticide target... but not most of them.
How about ... (Score:2)
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EM waves effects on insect population... (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
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Our diet would suffer immensely..