I have a cousin who has an electrical engineering Ph.D. degree and works in research and design of signal processing equipment for a major computer/ semiconductor company. I forwarded him some of the posts from Rex Boys about the Apidictor and here was his response: "This concept is fascinating and could be accomplished quite easily. I think the way to do it would be to fit the device to the hive and calibrate it on normal activity. (Of course, the calibration would be off if the bees were preparing to swarm when the device was first installed.) Then the sensor could look for activity that was significantly outside the norm. I think a simple semiconductor-based system could be developed to do this rather inexpensively. However, no one will ever go to the trouble unless there is a rather large market. Of course, the business people would want to know how many hives there are in the world, and how many of them would be likely to insert such a device at what cost points. Right now, using the parts that are currently available it might take about $10 or so to build a device like this. But $1 or $2 (maybe less) is probably achievable with some development effort. Of course, it would need to be studied carefully to say for sure." I thought these comments would be of interest to this list. It seems to me like this might be something worth pursuing. And I was just thinking that his company might be willing to pick this up as a project if there is an incentive to do so. Any thoughts? Layne Westover College Station, Texas, USA