New Sensor Technology Coming for Beekeepers

New Sensor Technology Coming for Beekeepers

Patrick Cavanaugh
Patrick Cavanaugh
Beekeepers for the almond and vegetable industries could soon know more about the health of their individual bee colonies by simply logging onto a website. It's known as ApisProtect under development by Irish engineers and scientists so that beekeepers can know what to do with their colonies in wind.

Dr. Fiona Edwards Murphy is a CEO and cofounder of ApisProtect. “I was learning about these sensors. I was really interested in finding a real world challenge that I could help with this new technology,” Murphy said. There are all these problems that bees and beekeepers have that we just don't know about; that we don't have access to that data that we need to understand what's happening. “

“What we do is we measure a lot of very simple parameters inside the beehive, so things like temperature, water, and the sound levels,” noted Murphy. “We can even tell if the hive has fallen over, because we have a movement sensor in there. We connect all of that data and we use this technology called machine learning, which is constantly improving the sensitivity of the sensors. “

Dr. Patrick Whelan, it's a chief science officer and cofounder of ApisProtect. He's also an expert beekeeper. “You could have a thousand hives in the orchard or field and you get regular information several times a day coming in to your computer,” said Whelan. “The beekeeper will see all these graphs operating the same as they should operate. And then you have other graphs that don't operate and we call these outliers. And then these outliers would signal to you there's something different about this hive.”

More information can be found at ApisProtect.com

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