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Comparing weight dynamics between urban and rural honeybee colonies in Latvia

Beekeeping is an important agricultural industry in Latvia, which has an area of 64,589 km2 and is largely mixed forest. The natural foraging base does not provide the honey yield evenly throughout the whole season, thus the average honey yield in Latvia is about 20 kg per colony. The objective of this research was to compare the weight dynamics of colonies placed in rural and urban environments. As urban beekeeping is becoming more popular, it is important to understand whether there are enough foraging resources within the city for the bee colonies. To do this, the weight changes of ten honey bee colonies was remotely monitored and analysed during the summer.

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Publication details

Authors
valja
Organizations
🇱🇻 Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies
Year
2023
Type
Journal

Relevancy to Gratheon

This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it informs entrance and behavior analytics in the Gratheon web app, sensor hardware, telemetry pipelines, and monitoring dashboards. 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.