(11 Aug 2015) LEAD-IN:
Engineers in Italy have invented a plug-in device to monitor the activity of honeybees in their hives.
It's hoped the data gathered will eventually help scientists find a solution to stopping the decline in honeybees around the world.
STORY-LINE :
Spring and summer for a busy honeybee means thousands of trips to and from the beehive everyday.
But many of these pollinators never make it back home.
What's happening? For years, the problem has left farmers worried, and scientists theorising.
Entomologist, Paolo Fontana has spent his entire life among bees. He believes there isn't a single culprit for honeybee decline.
"Bees interact with their environment at 360 degrees, so they absorb all the problems in the environment, from climate change, to changes in the landscape that leads to the decline of honeybee flora, the introduction of foreign organisms, in our case the Varroa destructor, intensive agriculture with its use of agro-pharmaceuticals and even bee-farming itself."
Besides making honey, honeybees pollinate more than 90 flowering crops. Among them are a variety of fruits and vegetables: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, citrus fruit and cranberries. About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination.
Clues of their decline are scattered in the environment, but also hidden inside the beehive.
That's where a group of Italian engineers are looking. Their new plug-in device called Melixa connects to beehives and is able to monitor traffic, and it doesn't miss a flight.
Melixa lead engineer, Mauro Martinelli says: "The Melixa system has the unique feature of counting the number of bees that come and go from the beehive during the day. This is very useful information because it lets you know the health of the hive, if the colony is growing, if it is producing, or if there are issues that need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis."
The Melixa system begins with these fourteen holes, big enough to let in one bee at a time. Each passage triggers a magnetic field. These electronic components record it, store it, and send it to a cloud server. As part of the Melixa system, the beehive sits on a digital scale that registers any change in weight. Environmental sensors keep track of weather conditions, internal temperature, and the exact geo-location of the beehive.
If the internal temperature of the hive drops below 15 degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit), the larvae might be in danger. If the weight drops, it signals that the old Queen Bee has left with the colony or that honey has been taken from the hive.
Martinelli says: "The collected data is uploaded on a cloud so the bee farmer or researcher can very easily access the interface, through real-time monitoring of all the information that is gathered by the system, in addition to seeing historic data and graphics on trends to understand the evolution of the colony over time."
The technology is already helping scientists interpret bee biology in its environment. In the valleys of Trentino, bee farmers are joining forces to buy Melixa systems that they can place them in strategic locations, and share data on bee behaviour.
Fontana says: "Until we start tackling the phenomenon in a more comprehensive way, we won't be able to understand much. So this type of monitoring helps get a clearer picture of bee development and biology, and connect possible population decline or slowing down of activity, to specific moments and times."
Worst case scenario in 2012-2013 was England.
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