A microphone is not a magical thing at all.

A mic with a poor low-frequency response is a good thing in bees, as there
is little of interest below 40Hz, and low-frequency vibration noise can mask
the sounds of value, moreso when the hives are on a rooftop or near industry
or traffic.  At the very high end, you can also find a lot of noise to mask
your signal, and not much more of any value.    So I'd actually put a
bandbass filter on any audio amp I made for bee use, likely I'd sharply roll
off at the low end at 40Hz, and at 15Khz at the high end.

The current technology found even in consumer-level products is amazing.
The range of audible frequencies that bees can generate are limited, and the
audio gear of today makes me laugh to think of my old condo in Boston with
the Macintosh tube amp, the Teac reel-to-reel tape deck, the direct-drive
turntable, and the (pyramid-shaped) Epicure quadraphonic speakers that made
my living room look like Easter Island.  (These days, I have a tiny Sonos
and a stack of 2-terrabyte NAS drives filled with FLAC files, but they will
pry my Onkyo Scepter 500 speakers, circa 1979, only from my cold, dead
hands.)

I have several toys that work fine for bee audio, as I amplify the bees in
ob hives when I do talks and install ob hives at schools.

The Panasonic RR-US450 digital recorder (current models are RR-US5xx, and
have more memory for longer recording time) is a good, small, cheap unit
with an amazing built-in mic, and enough sensitivity to record lectures and
meetings from the back of the room with ease.    It is best fitted with a
short length of cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels that fits over
one end, and is cut and taped to narrow down the diameter to the size of one
of the vent holes in the ob hive.  The recorder itself sits on a small block
of wood, and it snugs right up against the vent hole.  The gain will have to
be turned WAY down, or feedback will plague you no matter how far away you
put your speakers.  The recorder can be started, and put on pause, the
headphone jack will put out audio in real time from the mic with very little
lag.

The Sandisk Sansa Clip Plus  is another good device with a very sensitive
mic, but it will not echo the audio being recorded to the headphone jack.
The good news is that it has great battery life, and accepts microSDHC cards
up to 32GB.  It records at Bit rate: 384 Kbps, Sampling: 24 KHz, Resolution:
16 bits, which is overkill for any sound made by bees.  5 hours of audio
takes about 1.6GB, and the stock firmware  supplied by Sandisk will only
allow you to record to the built-in memory (2, 4, or 8GB), but the Rockbox
open source firmware can easily be installed with an auto-installer, and
will allow you to record to the microSDHC card.  This unit is small enough
to wrap in saran wrap, punch a hole for the mic (top edge middle), and push
directly into a comb.  It is 0.5 inches thick, 2 inches high, and 1.5 inches
wide.  Instant one-piece recorder and datalogger!

There are also lots of good lavaliere mics that can be used with inexpensive
preamps and a little class 5 speaker amps to make the bees sound loud in a
talk or display.  I don't like anything made by "Pyle Pro" who tends to live
at the bottom of all audio gear price ranges, but here are two $20 mics that
will work fine:

Sony ECM-CS3 Tie Clip Microphone
Olympus ME-15 Tie Clip Microphone for DS-4000

These mics are small enough to go into a drilled hole in a top bar or in the
wall of a hive, and be protected by 8-mesh, so that the bees can only
propolize the screen cover, not the mic itself.

If you simply must use your cellphone, gotcha covered.  Go get a $5 adapter,
the Maxell HP-22.
http://www.amazon.com/Maxell-190397-HP-22-Headphone-Adapter/dp/B001UAEVY0
There is a mic in the middle of the little plastic cylinder.  Not a great
mic, but you can replace it with a much better electret condenser mic from
electronics supply houses if you can read some specs and solder.  Your
headphones plug into the end of the cylinder, and the plug on the end plugs
into your cellphone, which can be loaded with one of any number of audio
recording apps.    Remove the plastic case, mount the circuit board with a
hot glue gun in an empty Chapstick tube that you have pulled the works out
of, and glue some mesh over one end to keep the bees out. Then run both the
wires out the hole you will drill in the cap.

But if you want to really see what the bees are doing, you will likely be
happier if you embed a Piezo-electric Vibration Sensor in the comb, like
this one:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9198

You get a LOT more data if you look at vibrations on comb, as airborne sound
is less important to bees as a form of communication than comb vibrations.

Sparkfun and Adafruit are the two best vendors of the current crop of hobby
electronics kits to take the output of the sensor mentioned above, and turn
it into a datastream.  Hobby electronics are now very simple and tinker-toy
like, one rarely needs even a soldering iron or a breadboard if one is
willing to pay about triple.  (As you might have guessed, I am just as
hardcore and old-skool about electronics as I am about beekeeping.  Yes, you
CAN solder tiny SMD devices to your own circuit board designs made by a
cloud-based PC-board service with nothing but an old toaster oven, just ask
me how!)

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