We have been recording colony sounds for over 8 years and have a new USDA SBIR Research Award to continue this work, now focused on early detection of exposure to pesticides..  We have patents in the USA and Canada for the use of sound for detection of exposures to toxic chemicals (i.e., biowarfare agents,under DoD funding) and for bee pest and bee disease detection (under a prior USDA SBIR award).  We are currently Beta testing and calibrating our hand-held scanners in US, NZ, and Australia.  We're negotiating commercial partnerships with a European company that also monitors hive sounds.  

For all of this work, we ended up designing and building our own microphones.  You are correct - bees will chew acoustic foam, object to bulky  microphones, and the small ones that are currently commercially available are sorely lacking in quality.  Plus honey, wax, and propolis all present problems in terms of continued functioning of a microphone.  In other words, most high end mikes are likely to fail in short time - remember, it's a high humidity environment, and the bees will attack a large foreign object by either trying to tear it apart to get rid of it or by covering  it over.  Either behavior ends up producing a lot of chewing and biting and scrabbling noises.  That's one of the challenges - isolating the microphone from direct contact with bees either chewing or crawling on the mike.  In fact, they tend to sting mikes with wind screens - either metal or foam.

What's your purpose for the recordings?  What frequency range do you need? We may be able to build some custom microphones for you.

Also, you'll probably need a suitable pre-amp btw the microphone and your recording device.  We use digital recorders or our own hand-held scanner to record and store the sounds.  

 
J.J. Bromenshenk
Bee Alert
Missoula, Mt
 
 

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