As the study of honey bee health has gained attention in the biology community, researchers have looked for new, non-invasive methods to monitor the health status of the colony. Since the beehive sound alters when the colony is exposed to stressors, analysis of the acoustic response of the colony has been used as a method to identify the type of stressor, whether it is chemical, pest, or disease. So far, two feature sets have been successfully used for this kind of analysis, being these low-level signal features and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). Here we propose using soundscape indices, developed initially to delineate acoustic diversity in ecosystems, as an alternative to now used features. In our study, we examine the beehive acoustic response to trichloromethane laced-air and blank air and compare the performance of all three feature sets to discern the colony's sound between the hive being exposed to the chemical and not. Our results show that sound indices overperform the alternative features sets on this task. Based on these findings, we consider sound indices to be a valid set of features for beehive sound analysis and present our results to call the attention of the community on this fact.

Because the sounds emitted by a managed honeybee colony embrace a wealth of information about the status within and outside the beehive, researchers are interested in developing a beehive sound-based assessment of the colony situation. However, how the global experts rank this approach is unclear. We assessed the importance of beehive sound-based colony monitoring using formal expert elicitation. Our results indicate that policy-making bodies should focus on a non-invasive acoustic approach to monitor swarming, honeybee health, pesticides, and environmental pollution at apiaries, as these were considered very important factors with high confidence by global experts. Moreover, all other factors (pests and pathogens, weather conditions, predators, food availability, and spatiotemporal patterns) are rated as important, but experts’ confidence in acoustically monitoring a few of the factors differs. Because experienced forager bees emit bursting sounds during the waggle dance (particularly during the waggle-run phase) at a specific angle on a vertical comb within the hive, we propose an acoustics-based recording setup using a Raspberry Pi and a QuadMic Array to investigate how this sound can predict the spatial and temporal information of the available food sources. In this article, we highlight how the factors falling into the inconclusive category of confidence have the potential to be acoustically monitored. Besides, this paper suggests new and unexplored directions for opening a window for future research in beehive acoustics.

For honeybees (Apis mellifera), food richness and experience put significant impacts in making foraging decisions. Bees that trace food-rich source they start establishing spatiotemporal memories, which assist them to revisit particular site on following days. There were two aims of conducting present research. Our first aim was to explore whether or not the different levels of food richness or rewards (10%, 30%, and 50% sugar solution) at a feeding source affect the number of forager bees for their visitation once the conditions are switched to unrewarding. While our second aim was to investigate that how the previous experiences affect bees for their foraging duration. For our first aim, we hypothesized that the switching of condition from high to low level of food richness at experienced feeding site (FA) will result gradual reduction in number of bees on particular food source. Moreover, concerning to our second aim, we predicted that the foraging efficiency of bees will increase with the experiences of the previous visits. Regarding our hypothesis, results show that the bees persist visiting those feeding sites that offer food-rich sources. However, the decrease in food richness consequence gradual decline in number of bees at feeding site, but the most remarkable thing is that they persist visiting their foraging trips for several days even if they are unrewarded with food-rich sources. These results also affirm our prediction that foraging efficiency of bees in term of trip duration will increase with the experiences of previous visits. In conclusion, bees exhibit considerable attachment with experienced feeding site that stop providing food anymore, and foraging duration of bees decreases with the experience.