It’s not every day we get to discover something amazing about honeybees, humans have kept them for thousands of years.  But over the last 3 weeks we have detected the ‘swarming signal’ on hives swarming all over town.

Here’s the timelapse video of the third hive detected to be swarming, where the bees actually clustered underneath the hive, confirming the swarm.

If it were a one off, we’d just have one datapoint, but of 12 full sized hives monitored in California for over the last month, in the last 2 weeks, 7 have swarmed.  All with a very similar activity pattern and timing!

Check out the amazing consistency in the swarming pattern between these hives:

We know this is different to Orientation Activity

We have been monitoring these hives for over a year, and many others that have joined the EyesOnHives Platform.

Not only do these hives all typically have their orientation spike in between 12-3pm presently, the left hive EyesOnHives video actually captured the swarm cluster underneath the hive.

 

with EyesOnHives, swarming can be detected in real time,

and beekeepers can get alerted

 

EyesOnHives was also able to automatically alert some of the beekeepers in real time to the swarming events taking place, and they confirmed visually.

 

Here’s the Swarming Data

Hive	Swarm Time	Date Observed	Swarming Peak BPS	Avg Peak BPS	Cluster Seen By Beek	Geographic Region
1	10:55am	Mar 4	100.74	~20	Seen by EyesOnHives	Santa Barbara
4	11:04am	Mar 16	139.06	~30	No, Signal Only	Santa Barbara
8	10:32am	Mar  8	89.26	~25	No, Signal Only	Tustin
9	10:22am	Feb 27	157.14	~35	Yes, Signal and Beek	Montecito
9	10:14am	Mar 9	174.11	~35	Yes, Cast Swarm	Montecito
15	10:15am	Feb 25	76.41	~15	No, Signal Only	Santa Barbara
18	10:44am	Mar 17	231.66	~35	No, Signal Only	Santa Barbara

This data is incredible since as far as we know, this is the first time swarming can be detected in real time, and beekeepers can get alerted.

So how can we detect this is swarming?

Through a combination of experience and algorithms, EyesOnHives is being trained to detect swarming.  Presently a beekeeper can set an alert for a certain “bees per second” activity threshold.

In all of the swarming cases, the BPS was approximately three times the magnitude of regular peak orientation activity, and it occurred before midday.  This is a real signature pattern.

Check out how much the swarming events stand out from the regular peak activity:

Conclusions

Real time swarm detection with EyesOnHives is a huge breakthrough in smart hive monitoring.

EyesOnHives can clearly detect a swarm as it is happening, and alert the beekeeper.  This creates a feedback loop for bee hive management, as well as potentially an opportunity for a beekeeper to capture the swarm before it leaves.

We have also shown that the swarming time is consistent between hives in a similar geographic region, and that beekeepers previously didn’t always know their hive had swarmed.

We will set out to publish our results in a bee journal, and continue development of predictive and learning algorithms to leverage the world leading dataset on the EyesOnHives platform.