The secret sounds of bees: honeybee vibro-acoustic patterns are influenced by environmental and colony health-related factors

Overview

Creighton University. Honeybees are an essential part of global food production and revenue. However, pollinators around the world are declining at a rate faster than ever recorded due to pesticides, diseases and pests, and habitat loss. Obtaining a better understanding of the relationships among environmental and health factors with measurable bee behavior and physiology may help predict or combat major colony loss. Vibroacoustics are sounds and vibrations that are emitted by bees in response to stimuli and may be essential to understand more about honeybee behavior and health. In this study, 18 hives in two different beeyards in Iowa were analyzed for their vibroacoustics, colony temperature, size, and overall colony health over the course of three winter months. The results of this study indicate that: cluster temperature is a predictor of colony size, thermal imaging is not a reliable tool for estimating colony size, aggressive colonies with suspected Africanized backgrounds exhibit unique spectral outputs, and dying hives also exhibit several unique spectral outputs. This is the first study to report vibroacoustic output of honey bee colonies during the winter months and indicates that a connection exists between honeybee colony size, health, behavior, temperature, and the presence of more unique vibroacoustic frequencies. The use of vibroacoustic monitoring in the winter months may be useful to determine the health state of a colony and could be used by beekeepers to determine when interventional strategies many be necessary to save a colony. Plasmonic and dielectric nanostructures: Distinguishing size, material, and dielectric environment via machine learning Aniket Pant* Department of Physics, University of Alabama Birmingham, AL

Competition history

• JSHS 2020 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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