Foraging flight-based health indicators for honey bee colonies using automatic monitoring systems

Honey bees play an extremely important role in agricultural industries. To prevent bee colonies from collapsing, it is critical to acquire real-time health information regarding bee populations. This study developed foraging flight-based indicators, including the daily incoming and outgoing flight frequencies of forager bees and the consistency of the pattern of daily routine of forager bees, to determine the health status of a honey bee colony. The frequencies of forager bees’ entering and leaving their beehive was calculated using the monitoring data obtained from an automatic bee monitoring system. The consistency of the pattern of daily routine of forager bees was represented by the residual rate of outgoing and incoming activities of the bees. A three-week experiment was conducted to investigate the performances of four mite (Varroa jacobsoni Oudemans) treatments after the colonies were infected by the mites, and the performances of the treatments were used to determine the health of the colonies. A variety of indicators, the proposed foraging flight-based indicators included, were adopted to evaluate the performances of the treatments. The autocorrelation and cross-correlation analysis results showed that without invading bee colonies the proposed foraging flight-based indicators were as effective as other indicators in determining the health of honey bee colonies. Thus, the proposed indicators could serve an effective and convenient tool for beekeepers to manage their beehives. Combining with the bee monitoring system capable of automatically collecting data of incoming and outgoing frequencies of forager bees, the health management of bee farms can be greatly improved.