Knowing and finding out what the buzz of bees means has been the mission of a group of researchers from the University of Montana. Artificial intelligence has been key in this project, where the algorithm of a mobile application has solved the mystery.
Bees are fundamental to the environment. Knowing how and why these insects act in one way or another has become the challenge of a group of experts from the University of Montana.
Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, understanding the behavior of bee hives will be easier. Through a application on mobile devicesyou know, beekeepers will be able to figure out what’s going on with just a buzz.
Preventing disease as a goal
The work developed by Jerry Bromenshenk and a group of fellow university bee experts is in the final stages of testing. It is an application that, through the use of a form of artificial intelligence, is able to analyze the sound of hum with the aim of concluding whether or not they suffer from a series of diseases.
An app to combat CCD
Bees are indispensable in both pollination and honey production. A change in their natural rhythms could affect the ecosystem and revolutionize the normal functioning of the colony.
To combat incidents in this sense, this app has been invented that aims to avoid certain types of afflictions such as colony collapse disorder (CCD). It is a mysterious syndrome that has affected both beekeepers in North America like those of Europe, and that seriously disrupts the day-to-day life of bees.
CCD makes bees disappear instantly and without any obvious reason from the hive, thus abandoning his queen, and breaking with the usual dynamic of a natural swarm, where a large group of worker bees follow the queen to form a new colony.
As an experienced beekeeper would know, the algorithm of the application is capable of hear the buzz of bees and determine your health.
In tan only thirty seconds the beekeeper will be able to analyze the sound emitted by their little ones by approaching the mobile device to the hive. If the application detects health problems in the insects, it will notify you instantly, thus facilitating the work of the beekeeper.
An ailment for every sound
The buzzing bees come from their flapping wings. A sound that can vary greatly depending on the health of insects. Therefore, the group of the University of Montana, led by Bromenshenk, decided attribute to each of the particular sounds a specific ailment.
Thus, he studied the sound recordings of the thousands of colonies of his global beekeepers network in which they were known to have suffered a problem. A whole database of sounds that allowed to develop an artificial neural network, that is, a form of machine learning used for the recognition of certain patterns, thus helping to build algorithms that could join the sounds associated with certain hive problems.
A work that allowed to identify up to seven different disorders, among which is the possibility of knowing the presence of beetles in the hive, pests of honey bees, parasitic mites or even brown foulard, a bacterial infection that can destroy entire colonies of bees.
