I-Corps: Remote monitoring of commercial pollination honey bee colonies

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will supply commercial beekeepers with a way to remotely monitor and identify honey bee colonies in need of management in real time, regardless of location, allowing for a reduction in annual colony loss. Currently, commercial beekeepers must rely on time intensive manual inspections to determine which colonies need assistance in the field. This practice is especially resource intensive for commercial migratory beekeepers who frequently relocate their honey bees to fulfill pollination services for US farmers. In addition, this proposed approach will allow for measuring impact of various agricultural landscapes on honey bee colony health, enabling farmers to engage in quantitative based discussions with farmers about pollinator friendly best practices. Ultimately this I-Crops project focuses on leveraging the economic importance of honey bees to create financial incentives for pollinator friendly farming practices across agricultural landscapes. This I-Corps project leverages traditional large dataset analysis and machine learning to decipher and detect adverse conditions within the honey bee colony, and how the landscapes in which colonies reside contribute to overall colony health. This is possible through continuous monitoring of the internal colony environment, which is meticulously regulated and stable when the colony is healthy, and utilization of long range low power communications infrastructure. When a colony is unhealthy or suffers an adverse event, like the loss of a queen, the colonies internal environment is disrupted. Honey bee populations have experienced large annual losses recently and although substantial research has been conducted on honey bees residing in backyard or university research apiaries, no work (apart from limited popular press interviews) have attempted to document the problems, economic and biological, that commercial migratory beekeepers and their bees face on their annual pollination cycle. Remote monitoring of these commercial colonies will provide much needed insight into the inner lives of this cohort of economically critical insects, in addition to providing optimization and logistical support to an essential component of US agricultural production. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.