Peter > I am saying is that if the content is there, we will recognize it -- hi-fi or low-fi. If there is no signal in the noise, it doesn't matter how you process it. Whatever you find is equivalent to reading tea leaves.<
But we have statistically significant signal to noise for many chemicals and for several colony health parameters - read our peer-reviewed, 2015 Biosensors paper. https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6374/5/4/678 If that doesn't convince you, we've ~ six years of technical reports based on multiple experiments that were submitted to our SBIR funding agencies (DoD and USDA). Those results convinced them to continue funding the R&D. What do you want more than statistically significant signal to noise discrimination to specific applied factors in controlled trials?
I will agree, looking at sonograms or any 2-d or 3-d visualization and trying to decode it is difficult, subject to human bias. Same with depending solely on human hearing. Eddie Woods claimed to be able to hear bees about to swarm, I'm tone deaf. Arnia has some waterfall visualizations of the warble that appear to confirm Eddie's warble.
Frankly, we don't include swarming - by time bees are broadcasting the warble, it's probable that it's too late to prevent the swarm.
I can't imagine that after all of your years managing and inspecting bees, you can't hear a colony that has recently gone queen less?
Should we be surprised that chemical weapon nerve agents would cause neurological changes that affect the sound a bee colony produces? Have you ever seen a drunk bee? Or a bee high on drugs? Or a bee that gets the jitters from too much caffeine? I have, and so have others, who have published in peer-reviewed articles.
Still not convinced? Explain why Howard Kerr's device could have any success separating AHB bees from EHB? Howard hypothesized that since the AHB tends to be slightly smaller than the EHB, the wing beat frequencies might shift, since the thorax of insects act as a spring to return the wings in an upswing.
How about pesticide exposure. Ever work colonies hit by malathion? They can get really aggressive. I assume you can hear aggressive colonies?
I respect your questioning the premise, but do you then also question the bee dance language? Frankly, our data and some other recent research has begun to show that maybe Wenner wasn't far off the mark. von Frisch and Adrian each had parts of the puzzle, but maybe the correct interpretation lies somewhere in the middle.
I'm not proposing yet, that bees have a vibrational or acoutic language. However, I'm not ruling it out.
But it doesn't seem so hard to imagine that nerve agents can affect bee sounds, that body size wouldn't affect wing beat frequency, that mites biting bees might not induce some form of response. If bee buzz when disturbed by a beekeeper, why is it hard to imagine that they might not respond to the biting of a mite?
Ever watch cows or horses during fly or mosquito season? They clearly respond - everything from tail switching, shivering, bunching up, to trying to escape the area of high insect density.
We don't pretend to fully understand what we are beginning to unravel, but we have strong evidence that the sounds produced by colonies change in predictable ways to at least 8 different colony condition metrics.
How well this works on smartphone platforms in a citizen scientist-based study is the objective of our Kickstarter project. If we can accurately TUNE our app, it will be a transformative technology. If not,, no one can say we didn't try.
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