A framework for better sensor-based beehive health monitoring

Hive bees provide essential pollination services to human agriculture. Managed honey bees in particular pollinate many crops, but also create honey and other bee products that are now of global economic importance. Key aspects of honey bee behaviour and colony health can be understood by observing hives. Hence, the limitations of manual observation are increasingly being addressed by new technologies that automate and extend the reach of hive monitoring. Here we propose a framework to classify and clarify the potential for sensor-assisted hive monitoring to inform apiculture and, ultimately, improve hive bee management and bee health. This framework considers hive monitoring approaches across three newly proposed categories: Operational monitoring, Investigative monitoring, and Predictive monitoring. These categories constitute a new “OIP Framework” of hive monitoring. Each category has its own requirements for underlying technology that includes sensors and ICT resources we outline. Each category is associated with particular outcomes and benefits for apiculture and hive health monitoring detailed here. Application of these three classes of sensor-assisted hive monitoring can simplify understanding and improve best-practice management of hive bees. Our survey and classification of hive monitoring to date show that it is seldom practised beyond honey bees, despite the need to understand bumble bees and stingless bees also. Perhaps unsurprisingly, sensor-based hive monitoring is shown to remain primarily a practice of countries with upper-middle and high income economies. Yet we show benefits from which all countries, especially countries with lower-middle and low income economies, stand to gain through improved sensor-based hive monitoring. These include a better understanding of environmental change, an increased ability to manage pollination, an ability to respond rapidly to hive health issues such as pests and pathogens, and even an ability to react quickly to the danger posed to insects and humans alike by extreme events such as floods and fires. Hive health is a critical issue for bees, beekeepers, horticulture and ecosystem sustainability. We show that its assessment requires a rigorous and coherent approach that has not yet been adequately formalised. Finally, we anticipate that the future of hive monitoring lies in the application of Predictive monitoring, such that a hive’s anticipated future state can be preemptively managed by beekeepers working iteratively with novel hive monitoring technologies.