You are invited to examine daily flight activity and internal hive
temperatures for seven hives as well as weather conditions over a two week
period at the University of Montana's Electronic Apiary in Missoula, Montana.
 
You can also see if Bob is working at his desk (updated every 15 seconds),
or if our happy bee is sitting in front of the Video Cam.
 
Finally, you can check the weather conditions in my office (updated every
15 seconds) by checking out the WeatherMax station.
 
The on-line capability was just realized this week.  The JAVA graphs work
best under Netscape and sometimes exhibit compatibility problems with
Explorer.  Older machines and browsers may not properly support JAVA.
 
Hive Flight Activity, Temperatures, Weather, etc.:
 
We have seven electronic hives at our reference site at the Vo-Tech West
Campus at the west end of the Missoula valley in western Montana.
 
Flight Activity Data Tables and Plots:
 
The numbers of bees entering and leaving each hive are continuously
monitored from early morning through late evening.  The bi-directional
counters collect data at a rate of 200 times per second.  Bees enter and
leave the hives via 14 passageways, each of which has two infra-red
detectors (sort of a honey bee toll booth system).  Depending on which
infra-red beam is blocked first by the bee and when the bee clears the
second beam, the computer software knows if the bee is going in or out of
the hive.  This data is summarized every 30 seconds and the count is saved
to the data file for the day.
 
When you click on the Forager Flight link, our server will present a table
of daily flight activity records from August, 1997.  The left-hand column
of files are text files containing the actual flight data.  If your
computer and browser supports JAVA, the right-hand column of files will
download and graph the flight activity for all of the hives for a specific
day.  When the graph appears, you will see all of the data for all seven
hives (a bit of a jumble).  Move your mouse to the column of buttons with
check marks and click on all but one box (e.g., Bees In, Hive 1).  Now,
click on the Bees Out, Hive 1 box, and that data series will be plotted.
If you click on the Alt Y box, you can establish a second Y axis (an option
that is most useful for examining hive temperature and weather station
data).  By clicking on the button boxes, you can toggle on or off any or
all of the line plots.  As such you can easily compare the hives.  Some
were very strong, some of moderate strength, and some had weak populations.
 All of these hives are mini-hives (see photographs posted on our site)
with from 1-3 pounds of bees.
 
When winter breaks, we intend to put the hives on-line in real-time.
 
 
Day Length and Hive Temperature:
 
The same computer collects light intensity data and the temperature at the
top of each two story hive (just under the cover) and on top of the frames
of the first box (near the brood nest).  Again, we present the data from
the seven hives in Missoula in August.  Either link takes you to the same
data files.
 
If you choose the JAVA graph, you will note that the very high maximum
values of light intensity tend to compress the plots for internal hive
temperatures.  You can either click on the button box to turn off the light
intensity plot, or you can click on the Alt Y axis.  That will force the
light intensity data to re-plot on a new Y axis that appears to the right
of the chart (but this axis sometimes disappears on Explorer Browsers).
 
You will note some spikes in the data and some very low temperature values.
 The spikes are mainly electronic noise, which we are working to eliminate.
 The lowest temperature value plots (for the most part) are temperatures
inside three bumblebee colonies in the same apiary.  THESE ARE RAW DATA
FILES.  As such, you will see some glitches.  Part of our work this past
fall has been to produce our own data acquisition software for this system
and for the weather station.
 
We have not been pleased with the reliability of communication protocols
used by several commercial software programs that can be used to interface
with these systems.
 
Again, we will put this system on-line in real-time in the spring.
 
 
WeatherMax (on-line now)
 
The weather station is sitting on top of Bob's computer.  Indoor
temperature and barometric pressure are correct.  A temperature probe is
hanging out the window to measure outside temperature.  Because we have not
gotten permission to mount a mast on our office building, the wind speed
and direction instruments are sitting on a chair in front of a fan.  The
rain collector and outside humidity are not hooked up.  But you can see 15
second updates of barometric pressure, changes in the pressure, outdoor
temperature, indoor temperature, and how fast the fan is pushing the
anemometer.  To more easily read temperatures on the chart, turn off the
barometric pressure or turn on the Alt Y axis for barometric pressure.
When winter breaks, we will have all of the Weather Station functions on-line.
 
If your browser does not support JAVA you can look at the 15 second Weather
Station data in tabular form.
 
If you examine the Historical Weather Files, you will find one for the
current day about half way down the list.  These files stores daily weather
summaries, plotted on 5 minute intervals.  Thus, today's weather will be
plotted from midnight through the moment that you open the file.
 
Again, you can also look at the text version of the weather files.
Depending on the browser, the column labels may not line up quite right
(they tend to shift to the left, not surprising under HTML).
 
JAVA Charts do not print from the standard browser print command.  On a PC,
you can hit the Alt and PrintScrn keys to save an image to the clipboard.
Paste it into a Paint Brush or Graphics compatible word processor or
spreadsheet.
 
The Tables for all data can be imported into spreadsheets.
 
 
I think every beekeeper will be interested in looking at the time lags of
incoming versus outgoing bees, differences in flight activity related to
colony strength, and differences in flight activity due to weather
conditions.  We have provided you with about two weeks of data for 7 hives.
 
 
We have about 6 months of data from 21 hives (96), 28 hives (97), and
currently have 7 hives in MD and 7 hives in MT logging data.
 
We will be publishing papers on these systems and unique data sets such as
colony swarms, effects of smoke, etc. in the near future.
 
 
Enjoy!
Jerry J. Bromenshenk, Ph.D.
Director, DOE/EPSCoR & Montana Organization for Research in Energy
The University of Montana-Missoula
Missoula, MT  59812-1002
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel:  406-243-5648
Fax:  406-243-4184