It seems to me that there are two different sorts of people involved here.

On one hand you have beekeepers whose main purpose is to find ways of avoiding  swarms.  They want a simple single-purpose instrument which Eddie Woods gave them in the apidictor.  He spent 15 years listening to the bees and identified several sounds in the spectrum of which two gave indication of swarm intentions.  One was the warble which indicated that the queen was off lay and the colony needed looking at.  The other was the hiss which told him whether or not a swarm was planned.  

He built a small, simple portable instrument with two knobs, an indicator and a push-button. In less than 30 seconds the beekeeper could decide whether or not to open up and inspect for queen cells.  Many beekeepers would welcome a modern equivalent.

The other people are the computer enthusiasts who have sound analysis software and are looking for excuses to use it, however complicated they are.  They are getting carried away and losing sight of the prime purpose which is to combat swarming.  It seems to me that because the equipment is capable of it, they want to do a complete spectrum analysis on every visit, repeating what Eddie Woods did 50 years ago.

Steven Jones wants to take a lap-top along with his smoker and his bee box.  How long before the keyboard is decorated with propolis? The apidictor was about a quarter of the size of a lap-top and hung from the neck in a leather case which also housed the microphone and earpiece.  Steve's alternative is to leave the lap-top in his vehicle and communicate with it by radio link.  I always thought the whole point of a computer was to look at things on a screen.  Could the computer give him answers without somebody in the cab to press the buttons?

Allen Dick visualises using a microphone with a parabolic reflector and aiming at each hive in turn from a distance.  In the first place I think he is optimistic about the polar diagram of those microphones; they have a much wider beam than he thinks and he would have difficulty in knowing which hive he was listening to.  Whilst striving to pick up sounds from inside an inch thick wooden box, he would find lots of competition from bees flying through the beam, to say nothing of the wind.  Then again, how would he thump the hive in order to activate that vital hiss?

Please do not think I want to be a spoil sport but I want to be sure you know what you are doing which is research into the use of a computer - not an exercise in swarm prevention.  Please go ahead and enjoy yourself.  You may well discover things that Eddie Woods missed but do please repeat the experiments many times and announce the results only when you are sure of them.    

Good Luck.  Rex Boys