Research library
Varroa destructor infestations are a leading cause of honey bee colony collapse, yet current detection methods are invasive, labor-intensive, and unsuitable for continuous monitoring. This study presents a field-deployed multimodal sensing system for non-invasive, real-time detection of varroa infestations in honey bee colonies. The system integrates three independent sensing modalities — computer vision, acoustic analysis, and environmental sensing — on an edge computing platform costing USD 189.68. A confidence-weighted fusion strategy combined predictions from all three modalities, reducing false alarm rate from 27.0% (vision only) to 0.5% while achieving precision 0.995, recall 0.921, and F1 0.957.
This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it directly informs the development of colony-health, monitoring-platform using technologies like computer-vision, audio-acoustics, iot-sensors, varroa-health. Its findings and methods can be directly applied to our precision apiculture telemetry and edge diagnostics pipelines to build reliable, scalable beehive monitoring products.