[ExI] Bee Watch

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Dave Sill
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 8:58 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Bee Watch

 

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com <mailto:danust2012 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Does every last give even need to be watched? Wouldn't a good small randomized sample tell us much for a given area? That might bring the cost down, especially if, say, only 2% of hives in a region can tell us about the overall status of all the hives in the same area. (Ditto for monitoring other species.)

 

>…That depends upon the purpose of the monitoring. If you're looking for a measure of regional health, then spot checking is fine. If you're looking to reduce the beekeeper's workload and identify problems as quickly as possible, then, yes, you want to monitor all the hives in the bee yard. -Dave

 

Ja.  The beekeepers hired me not for my muscles but for my eyes.  I was the only one of the crew who could see Varroa mites with unaided vision.  Neither of the guys I worked for could see them even with a magnifying glass.  If you have one infected hive in a bee yard, eventually it will spread to all of them.  But if you catch it early you can haul that one hive away into quarantine and save the rest.

 

If we could figure out a way to use cell phones and some kind of detection device cheap enough to instrument all the hives in a bee yard (which can be anywhere from one to a couple hundred hives) that would be a trick.  Perhaps something as simple as a microphone with some kind of specialized filtering and a Bluetooth connection to one cell phone, which reports status of all the hives might work?  If a hive could report sampled and Fourier filtered SPLs to a phone, which could process it and put it into a spreadsheet, then email that out every 10 minutes?

 

Electronics hipsters, what we you need besides a microphone and a cell phone which can receive signals from a couple dozen different Bluetooth devices?  Wouldn’t that be the entire hardware cost?  Then the rest would be clever software?  What is the range of a Bluetooth microphone?

 

spike

 

 

 

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