A Minimally Invasive Approach Towards “Ecosystem Hacking” With Honeybees
Hofstadler 1, Tomáš Krajník 2, Ali Emre Turgut 3,4, Hande Alemdar 4,5, Barry Lennox 5, Erol Şahin 4,5, Farshad Arvin 5 and Thomas Schmickl 1 1 Artificial Life Lab, Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria, 2Artificial Intelligence Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czechia, 3Department of Mechanical Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye, 4ROMER-Center for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye, 5Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye Edited by: Sridhar Ravi, University of New South Wales, Australia Reviewed by: Danielo G. Gomes, Federal University of Ceara, Brazil Luca Scimeca, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom *Correspondence: Martin Stefanec martin.stefanec@uni-graz.at Specialty section: This article was submitted to Bio-Inspired Robotics, a section of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI Received: 09 October 2021 Accepted: 02 March 2022 Published: 28 April 2022 Citation: Stefanec M, Hofstadler DN, Krajník T, Turgut AE, Alemdar H, Lennox B, Şahin E, Arvin F and Schmickl T (2022) A Minimally Invasive Approach Towards “Ecosystem Hacking” With Honeybees. AI 9:791921. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2022.791921 Honey bees live in colonies of thousands of individuals, that not only need to collaborate with each other but also to interact intensively with their ecosystem. A small group of robots operating in a honey bee colony and interacting with the queen bee, a central colony element, has the potential to change the collective behavior of the entire colony and thus also improve its interaction with the surrounding ecosystem.
This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it informs entrance and behavior analytics in the Gratheon web app, the long-term autonomous-apiary and robotic intervention roadmap. Its methods and findings can be translated into product requirements for reliable field deployments: what should be sensed, how signals should be interpreted, and which uncertainty or validation limits need to be surfaced to beekeepers. For Gratheon, the work is most useful as an evidence-backed design reference for connecting local hive observations with actionable recommendations in the web app while keeping hardware practical for remote apiaries.
