Insects (Jan 2024)

Bridging the Gap between Field Experiments and Machine Learning: The EC H2020 B-GOOD Project as a Case Study towards Automated Predictive Health Monitoring of Honey Bee Colonies

  • Coby van Dooremalen,
  • Zeynep N. Ulgezen,
  • Raffaele Dall’Olio,
  • Ugoline Godeau,
  • Xiaodong Duan,
  • José Paulo Sousa,
  • Marc O. Schäfer,
  • Alexis Beaurepaire,
  • Pim van Gennip,
  • Marten Schoonman,
  • Claude Flener,
  • Severine Matthijs,
  • David Claeys Boúúaert,
  • Wim Verbeke,
  • Dana Freshley,
  • Dirk-Jan Valkenburg,
  • Trudy van den Bosch,
  • Famke Schaafsma,
  • Jeroen Peters,
  • Mang Xu,
  • Yves Le Conte,
  • Cedric Alaux,
  • Anne Dalmon,
  • Robert J. Paxton,
  • Anja Tehel,
  • Tabea Streicher,
  • Daniel S. Dezmirean,
  • Alexandru I. Giurgiu,
  • Christopher J. Topping,
  • James Henty Williams,
  • Nuno Capela,
  • Sara Lopes,
  • Fátima Alves,
  • Joana Alves,
  • João Bica,
  • Sandra Simões,
  • António Alves da Silva,
  • Sílvia Castro,
  • João Loureiro,
  • Eva Horčičková,
  • Martin Bencsik,
  • Adam McVeigh,
  • Tarun Kumar,
  • Arrigo Moro,
  • April van Delden,
  • Elżbieta Ziółkowska,
  • Michał Filipiak,
  • Łukasz Mikołajczyk,
  • Kirsten Leufgen,
  • Lina De Smet,
  • Dirk C. de Graaf

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/insects15010076
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
p. 76

Abstract

Read online

Honey bee colonies have great societal and economic importance. The main challenge that beekeepers face is keeping bee colonies healthy under ever-changing environmental conditions. In the past two decades, beekeepers that manage colonies of Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) have become increasingly concerned by the presence of parasites and pathogens affecting the bees, the reduction in pollen and nectar availability, and the colonies’ exposure to pesticides, among others. Hence, beekeepers need to know the health condition of their colonies and how to keep them alive and thriving, which creates a need for a new holistic data collection method to harmonize the flow of information from various sources that can be linked at the colony level for different health determinants, such as bee colony, environmental, socioeconomic, and genetic statuses. For this purpose, we have developed and implemented the B-GOOD (Giving Beekeeping Guidance by computational-assisted Decision Making) project as a case study to categorize the colony’s health condition and find a Health Status Index (HSI). Using a 3-tier setup guided by work plans and standardized protocols, we have collected data from inside the colonies (amount of brood, disease load, honey harvest, etc.) and from their environment (floral resource availability). Most of the project’s data was automatically collected by the BEEP Base Sensor System. This continuous stream of data served as the basis to determine and validate an algorithm to calculate the HSI using machine learning. In this article, we share our insights on this holistic methodology and also highlight the importance of using a standardized data language to increase the compatibility between different current and future studies. We argue that the combined management of big data will be an essential building block in the development of targeted guidance for beekeepers and for the future of sustainable beekeeping.

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