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Integration of Scales and Cameras in Nondisruptive ElectronicBeehive Monitoring: On the Within-Day Relationship of HiveWeight and Traffic in Honeybee (Apis mellifera) Colonies in Langstroth Hives in Tucson, Arizona, USA

The relationship between beehive weight and traffic is a fundamental open research problem for electronic beehive monitoring and digital apiculture, because weight and traffic affect many aspects of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colony dynamics. An investigation of this relationship was conducted with a nondisruptive two-sensor (scale and camera) system on the weight and video data collected on six Apis mellifera colonies in Langstroth hives at the USDA-ARS Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Arizona, USA, from 15 May to 15 August 2021. Three hives had positive and two hives had negative correlations between weight and traffic. In one hive, weight and traffic were uncorrelated. The strength of the correlation between weight and traffic was stronger for longer time.

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Publication details

Authors
Vladimir Kulyukin, Anastasiia Tkachenko, Kristoffer Price, William Meikle, Milagra Weiss
Organizations
🇺🇸 Utah State University
Year
2022
Type
Journal

Relevancy to Gratheon

This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it informs camera-based hive-scanner and computer-vision models, 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.