Hello from an Aussie transplant in the US.

[KTemby]

Hi!

I'm a second generation beekeeper reconnecting with bees. Made a break from my rural Australia roots to become a medical robotics engineer in California designing telehealth robotic systems to help doctors treat patients remotely. When not developing a new algorithm or prototyping a robot, I'm found tending my backyard organic garden and seven bee hives or volunteering for my local beekeeping association.

Ask me about bee analytics and data - my current passion and project is a health monitor for honey bees. It's called EyesOnHives, it's been growing for the past year locally, and it helps beekeepers keep an eye on hive health, with software that measures hive activity and gives video highlight playback of the hive entrance.

 

[bpmurray]

It's called EyesOnHives, it's been growing for the past year locally, and it helps beekeepers keep an eye on hive health, with software that measures hive activity and gives video highlight playback of the hive entrance.

Hi K. and welcome. I will, of course, assume you're not trying to sell EyesOnHives here. It's interesting what our Antipodean friends have come up with over this past year - the FlowHive with its probably-clogged-with-OSR (or definitely-clogged-with-Ivy) mechanics and now your camera thing.

I have to admit that the motion recognition looks really cool - how many bees can it track at once? Could it potentially alert on realising that there were thousands of bees heading away from the hive in a swarm?

 

[KTemby]

Hi bpmurray! Thanks for the warm welcome!

I'm here to talk with beekeepers, especially those interested in innovation and technology like I am! I'd like to build the best device to help beekeepers see and keep track of their bees. The best way to do that is to ask for feedback from other beekeepers!

Glad you like the motion tracking algorithm - it took a ton of work to make that thing work - and it was especially difficult to get it to be robust to changes in lighting like the shadows from a tree blowing in the wind. The next challenge was to get it to work on a low power device, rather than a powerful laptop. Happy to say we did it!

One of the first analytics we did was create an alert based on activity thresholds! Right now the most common activity threshold is due to the orientation activity spike. We have also seen robbing. I just posted pics in the software thread.

Believe it or not, our local beekeepers have been managing the swarming urge of all the monitored hives, so we don't yet have the swarming pattern. Can't wait to get a full record and profile of that, and I'm considering 'poorly managing' one of my hives to encourage it to swarm, for science!

Cheers!