To respond to Jim and Answer Mark
We did much the same as Jim for the same reason - why smoke bees if you can freeze them on the frames with sound? We discovered a different frequency to use than piping, but the result was the same. We ffound this about 20 years ago when one of my students accidentally froze a colony. First we thought it was something new, then realized that the old timers knew about it. Drag your fingernail down the glass of an observation hive (line chalk on a blackboard) and watch the bees. Note, this is highly irritating to human ears, and really does a job on the bees.
As per Mark's questions - anyone can plug a microphone into a beehive. Bees don't like them and will try to cover with propolis. You've got to be creative, if you want a permanently, hive mounted microphone. Huw Evans at Arnia in UK, who we work with, sells a hive-mounted microphone and temperature sensor system and cellular (GSM) communications system in Europe. His microphones are aimed at detecting swarming and general hive activity. We are in discussions with him about providing him a license to sell in USA (we hold North American patents on beehive acoustics). Huw's system would be good for small scale, backyard beekeeping. Its reasonably inexpensive, but that low price has a downside. First, its not clear how much time and effort will be involved making the North American communications formats compatible with his European formats, and there is the issue of setting up cellular service contracts in US, Canada, Mexico, etc. Second, and more importantly, his data gathering and communications systems does not have the processing power to run our acoustic data analysis algorithms. So, he's interested in our system as a step-up for distribution in Europe, and we're interested in his systems as an introductory or more affordable system that we could distribute to small scale beekeepers in North America.
We are moving toward hive-mounted microphones as costs decrease and as we get our calibrations.
Our hand-held can be used on as many hives as you can sample in a day, avoids the propolis problem, and allows us to use a custom, specially designed microphone. My engineers and electronics guys put this together. We only need about 2 minute sound bites for calibration, 30-60 seconds for hive analysis using a calibrated system. Our first customer base is of course the folks with thousands of hives, who generally only inspect a small percent of their total hives. We want to enable sampling them all at an affordable cost. If we can get the hand-held dialed in, then we can pick the appropriate microphone and algorithms for hive-mounted microphones.
One of our current research questions is whether our extended range microphone significantly improves discrimination. If it does, that's very good, justifies its cost and use. If it doesn't, then we'll go back to audible range microphones. I can't answer that question at the moment, just will comment that it is showing potential (and we still get the audible range data as a fallback).
The big issue is sonogram analysis. Eddie Woods used a simple band-path frequency filter to detect swarming. Howard Kerr at Oak Ridge used wing-beat frequency to discriminate btw European and Africanized bees (but he could only separate that two extremes - truly European, mostly African. We've taken this much, much farther. But it has taken us years to work out the parameters and build the libraries.
That part is not yet ready for distribution, its a work in progress. So, you can plug a microphone in, try to place it so bees don't gunk it up, and stream hive noise to your Cloud. What you do with it at that point depends on you.
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