> If you read the statement, it was about 
> the idea, the concept of electronic hive 
> monitoring.

No one except Rube Goldberg would have ever attempted "mechanical hive
monitoring", so lumping everything together as "electronic" encompasses
everything from my coffeemaker (the most crucial element in any
hive-monitoring effort is coffee-production hardware!) to the gigabit switch
that connects the cables from the weather station equipment to the disc
where the data is written on one of my rooftop apiaries. 

In comparing the Woods Apidictor, a primitive spectrum analyzer, to the
current work, very different things were conflated as if they were related.
Wood's device was NOT AT ALL like a telephone, and what you call a
"telephone" today, would have literally been called a "Supercomputer" as
recently as the late 1990s.  ("Deep Blue", the supercomputer who beat all
comers at chess in 1997, maxed out at about 11 gigaflops, while a Samsung
Galaxy S5 runs at 142 gigaflops, and the Galaxy S9 at 727 gigaflops.  No
idea what the S10 does, but it is sure to be more - GPUs just win.)  Just
because two items are handheld devices does not imply anything more.

The key difference in the current batch of toys is the use of AI" or
"machine learning", as these programs can (blindly) associate inputs with
outcomes and "learn", abet in a manner that is not easy to fathom once it
starts producing useful results.

Have any of the "hive sensor" tools been practical or useful?  Not really,
not significantly more useful than simply tracking the weather.  But these
are mere sensors that report raw data, not sensors connected to anything
that would interpret the data.

My little Nectar Detector hive scale was easy to make "intelligent" and burn
the "smarts" into a field-programmable gate array.  But this is not actual
"intelligence", it's just doing some math for the beekeeper.  The true AI
stuff may (at some future point) cost-effective enough to change the concept
of a "hive inspection" completely.  No, it likely won't be initially as good
as you or I would be when looking at hive entrances before dawn to triage
which colonies need to be looked at, but it will at least provide the same
flagging of "exceptions" without needing to visit the beeyard before dawn,
or visit at all if fitted for cellular or packet VHF/Ham radio.

But beekeepers will, of course, argue with, ignore, and defy any AI that
would provide any value.   I could not even convince people to deal with
Nosema Apis back when it was the only nosema we had to worry about, so I
have low expectations about market penetration.

Sorry about the article, if you wanted input, you should have overtly asked.

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