At 10:14 PM 2/7/00 PST, Deodato Wirz Vieira wrote:
>Sometimes it has to be said: People miss the obvious
>
>The obvious being missed this time seems to me: It is very expensive to
>develop such a system, not to build it


Deodata is correct - developing the system, not building it is the major
cost factor (time, dollars, personnel).

However, the statement "People miss the obvious" is also appropriate:

I'm not sure how anyone by now has missed the point that we have spent 6
years developing these technologies.  We have tested some 50 electronic
hives in MT, MD, MI, NM, AZ  (I'd say the weather range was from cold to
hot, rural to urban, farm to federal facilities (military sites).  We have
months and months of continous data over a several year period from
multiple hives at multiple sites.  We port all of the data across the
Internet to our offices in Montana.

The real work has been not in the electronics but in the software programs
that collect, store, communicate, and interpret the data.  Pattern learning
computer programs routinely screen the data flows, checking bee performance
(colony) against weather conditions, bee management activities, and
exposures to a variety of stressors ranging from industrial pollutants to
military chemicals to pesticides.  Numerical processing software flags data
events such as swarming, helping to provide clear and easy to interpret
reports on each and every hive, apiary, and location in the U.S.  This has
been a more of less full time activity for UM faculty members, graduate
students, and undergraduate students since 1995.  We design, build, and
test everything.  We are just now beginning to publicize the technology,
having done our homework (and lots of it).

And yes, we have had lots of help from both hobbiest and commercial
beekeepers in all of these states.  The current work is an outgrowth of
over 20 years of research aimed at developing better tools for
investigating bees, providing new bee services that can be marketed by
beekeepers, and hopefully, in the not too distant future, affordable
systems that will bring precision agriculture capabilities to large and
moderate scale bee operations.

Cheers