By Sofia Strodt

With an electronic ‘ping’, Professor Dirk de Graaf receives a notification on his smartphone. It is a message from a beehive in trouble.

De Graaf, professor of biomedical physiology and insect physiology and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Entomology and Bee Pathology at Ghent University, Belgium, has spent the past five years developing a beehive data collection system that he hopes will significantly improve survival rates.

Smart beehives

As part of an EU-funded European research initiative, the B-GOOD project, De Graaf and a team of researchers from 13 European countries collaborated between mid-2019 and November last year to investigate how new technologies can support both bee health and the sustainability of beekeeping.

The researchers have developed a monitoring system that can identify problems in a bee colony and provide the beekeeper with tailored advice on how to intervene. This system is a potentially crucial ally for beekeepers, of whom there were an estimated 615,000 in the EU in 2021.

They developed a digital comb – a thin circuit board with multiple sensors around which bees build their combs. Multiple of these in each hive can then send data to researchers, allowing for real-time monitoring.

If more beekeepers would rely on this, it would be a huge change.

Dirk de Graaf, B-GOOD

The next step was to find out how to best interpret the data. ‘The challenge was to find out which parameters contribute most to the health status of a colony,’ says de Graaf.

Over three seasons, the team monitored nearly 400 colonies across the 13 participating countries, allowing them to develop algorithms to interpret the data collected by the digital combs.

“It turns out that weight is a good indicator of whether a colony will survive the winter,” says de Graaf. “Using our technology, we can now identify colonies that require intervention. This is then communicated to the beekeepers via customized alerts with specific instructions.”

Technically sound beekeeping

Bees are a keystone species, essential for the pollination of wild plants and many cultivated food crops, including chocolate, coffee, tomatoes and blueberries. It is estimated that around four out of five crop and wild flowering plant species in Europe depend, at least to some extent, on insect pollination.

Yet, the number of wild pollinators in Europe and the world is declining rapidly due to the combined impact of climate change, habitat loss and widespread use of pesticides. According to the European Red List, the populations of around one in three bee, butterfly and hoverfly species are threatened. For De Graaf, the effects of pesticides are particularly damaging.

‘Very often, the bees do not die immediately when exposed to pesticides, but they develop memory problems and ultimately do not return to their nest,’ says de Graaf.

Automatic collection of beehive data is already being used by some beekeepers, mostly younger and tech-savvy. The aim now is to promote the use of these tools across the beekeeping community, which will enable larger-scale data collection. To this end, the researchers are working closely with the EU Bee Partnership, an EU-wide platform for bee health and data management established in 2017.

“If more beekeepers would rely on this, it would be a huge change. It would help us to look at bee health from a different perspective,” says de Graaf.

The technology they developed could also potentially help beekeepers plan future hives. The B-GOOD team used the data to create virtual landscapes that predict how a hive will respond to certain environmental conditions. “It’s a bit like a flight simulator for beekeepers,” he said.

Thanks to continued funding from the EU, B-GOOD researchers can continue their valuable work through the BETTER-B research initiative, which runs until May 2027.

Interior view

Professor Thomas Schmickl, a professor of zoology at the University of Graz, Austria, has also been researching the use of cutting-edge technology to support honeybee health for the past five years. This was part of another EU-funded research initiative called HIVEOPOLIS, which ran from 2019 until March this year.

Schmickl is the founder of the Artificial Life Lab (ALL) at the University of Graz, an international, interdisciplinary research laboratory conducting research in the areas of swarm intelligence, self-organization, swarm robotics and biologically inspired algorithms.

Much of the work done at ALL is based on taking inspiration from nature to inform advances in robotics. In HIVEOPOLIS, researchers are turning this around and instead looking at how advances in robotics can support nature. Schmickl calls this concept ecosystem hacking.

“Honeybees are extremely powerful. If you support them, you support the environment around them,” Schmickl said. “Pollination can only be maintained with the help of bees.”

He points out that reduced insect pollination will reduce farmers’ yields, which will increase food prices. This will put pressure on farmers to use intensive, environmentally damaging farming methods that will further reduce insect populations. It’s a vicious circle.

Like the B-GOOD team, the HIVEOPOLIS researchers have developed a digital honeycomb equipped with sensors. By measuring temperatures at different points in the hive, the researchers can effectively map what is happening inside.

For example, beekeepers can see where the brood is in a beehive, the so-called brood nest. Beekeepers can then open the hive without disturbing the sensitive brood nest area.

Stay warm

But HIVEOPOLIS’ digital combs aren’t just sensors; they can also be activated to heat certain parts of a hive. According to Schmickl, this can make a big difference to survival rates.

“A lot of bee colonies die in the winter,” he said. “They need honey to survive, but sometimes those supplies are out of reach, so bees die from the cold trying to get to the honey.” By keeping bees warm during the winter, beekeepers can increase the colonies’ chances of survival.

Pollination can only take place with the help of bees.

Thomas Schmickl, HIVEOPOLIS

“This is the first time we can change the temperature from the comb, by sending the command directly over the Internet. No one has ever done that before,” he said.

At first it was unclear how the bees would respond to the technology. However, experiments confirmed that not only did the colonies respond positively, but that swarm intelligence responds to the temperature changes by reducing the bees’ own heat production, helping them conserve energy.

Dancing bees

Inspired by the work of Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch, the HIVEOPOLIS team also investigated the possibility of communicating with bees in a very original way.

In 1973, von Frisch received the Nobel Prize for his work in deciphering the waggle dance of honeybees, a dance the bees use to communicate the location of food sources.

He postulated that the angle to the hive, the formation of the dance, and the speed of the wagging movement all together indicated the direction and distance of the food source. This type of communication by movement seems to be unique in the insect world and is a source of fascination for researchers.

Dr. Tim Landgraf, professor of artificial and collective intelligence at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, one of the partners in HIVEOPOLIS, expanded on his previous work, which included the development of a robotic dancing bee, RoboBee, and provided the first indications that bees are willing to follow the lead of a digital partner.

In HIVEOPOLIS, Landgraf’s research lab has developed a system to observe real honeybee dances and translate them onto a map so they can be analyzed more precisely.

Ultimately, the HIVEOPOLIS team believes such a robot could guide honeybees to safe foraging sites and away from dangerous areas, such as those contaminated by pesticides or disease. But first, they want to better understand the dance.

Schmickl said he hopes beekeepers will make good use of the work being done. “We have the prototypes, now it’s up to the free market to use these technologies on a larger scale.”

The research in this article was funded by the EU’s Horizon programme, including, in the case of HIVEOPOLIS, through the European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission. If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

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This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU’s research and innovation journal with Creative Commons Attribution

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