DECODING THE WAGGLE DANCE

Monoculture farming is a key reason why bee colonies are on the decline.

Bees thrive in biodiverse areas, with an all-year-round food supply. However, one crop blooms for only a limited period, so bees need to seek food elsewhere, and often far away. This means finding the best flowers. To achieve this, they use a waggle dance.

Beefutures in Norway partnered with IT consulting company Amesto NextBridge to decode the bee waggle dance in real time using SAS Viya technology. When decoded manually, there are only a few specialists who are able to do it, and they decipher around 100 dances a year from only a handful of hives. ‘Real-time decoding processes 100 dances an hour, and the analysis can happen at many more locations,’ explains Christophe P Brod, CEO of Beefutures. ‘This means continuous monitoring of large areas over a longer duration.’

And these are exciting developments. With climate change being one of the biggest challenges of our time affecting insects and the greater ecosystem, making sense of the waggle dance can mean turning observation hives into ecosystem stations that communicate real-time impacts.

To decode the bee waggle dance, Beefutures uses recorded and real-time video sources captured inside the hives. Video feeds at the hive entrance are used for additional data analysis. Through video-based AI, bees are detected, tracked and counted as they leave and enter, assessing foraging levels and possible poisoning episodes (by gauging non-returning bees and detecting abnormal drops). To further assess bee-colony strength, evolution, health and foraging activity, the beehive is equipped with a sound-monitoring system, a digital weight scale and discrete temperature- and humidity monitoring.

‘As a biologist by training, what surprised me most was how all-inclusive the bee waggle dance is,’ adds Silje Nord, a data scientist at Amesto NextBridge. ‘I learned that bees can disagree with each other, and that they communicate this by interrupting each other’s dance. They also try to sell their spot as the most-optimal food location by turning up the intensity of their dance.’

Ultimately, waggle-dance technology can help growers to rehabilitate monoculture areas into pollinator ponds, ensuring the shortest distance to food at all times of the year. ‘These are the conditions needed to create a suitable environment that entices pollinators back and re-establishes a natural ecosystem,’ says Brod. ‘By creating suitable living areas for pollinators all-year round, soil enrichment increases, while, at the same time, growers also benefit from the wild pollinators.’

popularmechanics.co.za Opposite: Bee hives may look like simple wood structures, but the technology inside will surprise you. Below: Beekeepers around the world are using AI, ML, IoT and the cloud to better understand honeybees.