Our bee friends have certain behaviors that make the hive unhealthy and scary for passers-by. One behavior, swarming, happens when a hive naturally divides with a group of bees following a new queen. This is a fine time for the hive and can lead to starving bees and a dead queen. In other words, it’s bad.
One beekeeper, Herbert M. Aumann, has a solution. Its system is a small vibration and motion sensor that attaches to the outside of a hive and transmits data on the behavior of the bees. Beekeepers can divide hives before swarming begins, and thus this system uses the two sensors to detect the behavior before it falls.
“This sensor is attached to the outside of a hive, near the entrance to the hive,” Aumann wrote in a letter. study IEEE Sensors Letters. The outward-facing sensor is a 24-GHz continuous-wave Doppler radar to monitor bee-flying activity. The inward-facing sensor is a piezoelectric converter. Unlike an ordinary microphone that picks up the sounds of bees, the piezoelectric transducer picks up the accidental vibrations transmitted by bee activity to the hive structure.
The system then calculates the probability of a swarm and notifies the beekeeper so she can keep her small yellow and black fillings safe. When the bees gather before a stormy event, the sensor will detect the vibrations of the event so that the beekeeper can stop the activity by modifying the hive box enough to keep the bees in place. The sensor can also notify the beekeeper of events that are robbed when bees from outside a hive take over an entire hive and steal the honey from weaker bees.
‘Since I spent my career building radar systems for tracking small targets, I thought I could use a low – power radar to view bees about ten feet away. Indeed, I could, ”Aumann said Spectrum. “Surprisingly, the signals picked up by the radar could be turned into an acoustic signal that sounds exactly like the signal you would see standing next to the beehive.”
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He made a start, MaineBiosensors, to produce these electronics for beekeepers who want to keep their little honey-making friends healthy and happy. He’s not selling it yet, but he expects to have consumer models soon.