Now for something different.
As many of you know, we've been working for several years on a hand-held
device that can diagnose bee diseases and the presence of mites and other
pests, based on the sounds that bee colonies produce.
We got the patent in place this spring.
We know that sound can be used to differentiate african from european honey
bees.
Our system has shown to be capable of even distinguishing some of the
European races of honey bee.
We want to add reliable EHB/AHB discrimination to our system; but to do
this, we need data sets of really good recordings from the two races - and we
need to know for sure that the EHB are truly EHB, the AHB are truly AHB -
i.e. Apis mellifera scutellata.
Recordings of races of the EHB is not a problem, but getting AHB is a
bigger challenge. At first, we'd like recordings of scutellata, not a hybrid -
so S. Africa might be the best area to sample. And, it would be great to
get africanized bee samples from appropriate areas of S. America.
In order to add the capability of distinguishing European from African
bees, and hopefully even hybrids; we need high quality recordings of bee
sounds and volunteers (beekeepers/researchers) to take them - we would provide
the necessary equipment on loan.
We'd ask the volunteers to sign a non-disclosure form - simply to protect
our patents (i.e., we are concerned about others back-engineering our
system, then using our own data to produce and sell a competing device), as well
as an agreement to return the equipment in a timely manner.
We'd want to publish a paper on discrimination of honey bee races based on
bio-acoustics, and we anticipate that the volunteer(s) would be co-authors.
We would like to obtain recordings from at least 100 individual colonies
for each race of honey bee. Two minute recording per hive. And, we'd need
some background on the hives - minimally, whether they are 'healthy',
reasonably free of mites, hive beetles, etc. We can use recording of infested
colonies, but need to know that they are infested, since that changes the
sound profile. Again, for first trials, we'd like them to be in good shape,
free of obvious bee pests and diseases - adding these other variables
complicates things.
Ideally, we'd like recordings for each hive from different times of the day
(morning, afternoon, night) during the active season (when bees are
foraging). To take a recording, you simply slip a 12" (~ 30 cm) x 1/8" (3 mm)
probe microphone in to the colony, wait for the bees to calm down, turn on
the recorder, take a two minute recording (remembering NOT to talk while
recording), then stop the recording and save the file.
Our primary objective is to distinguish AHB from EHB in the U.S., but if
someone in Africa or SE Asia could sample other African races, that would be
wonderful. We'd also be interested in recordings from Brazil as the point
of origin of AHB.
Identification of the bee races will depend on the source - we may have to
do some genetic sampling, but that also depends on where the samples are
from, history (i.e., a research group supplying bees of known race), etc.
If you'd like to volunteer or know someone who may, please contact us
off-list:
Robert Seccomb, project lead, [log in to unmask]
(mailto:[log in to unmask]) ; or me at
[log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) .
Thanks to all, maybe we can do some science together.
Jerry
J.J. Bromenshenk
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