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Even if keeping bees sounds about as wise to you as keeping velociraptors (we all know how that movie went), we have to acknowledge that they are a worthwhile thing to have around. We don’t personally want them around us of course, but we respect those who are willing to keep a hive on their property for the good of the environment. But as it turns out, there are more challenges to keeping bees than not getting stung: you’ve got to keep track of the things too.
After some training, a Raspberry Pi with a camera can count how many bees are in a given image to within a few percent of the actual number. Getting an accurate count of his bees allows [Mat] to generate fascinating visualizations about his hive’s activity and health. With real-world threats such as colony collapse disorder, this type of hard data can be crucial.
This is a perfect example of a hack which might not pertain to many of us as-is, but still contains a wealth of information which could be applicable to other projects. [Mat] goes into a fantastic amount of detail about the different approaches he tried, what worked, what didn’t, and where he goes from here. So far the only problem he’s having is with the Raspberry Pi: it’s only able to run at one frame per second due to the computational requirements of identifying the bees. But he’s got some ideas to improve the situation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @05:44PM
Unfortunately that's not going to tell you whether each bee is entering or leaving the hive, so while it may give you may have a good estimate of how many bees are in the picture, it tells you nothing about how many bees are in the hive.
Meanwhile photographing the whole hive at once is difficult, unless you've designed a large single-comb hive between glass plates, with insufficient room for them to obscure the plates, and something providing enough incentive for them to not leave to form a more pleasant hive on their own. (I suppose imprisoning the larger queen will do the job, and isn't terribly difficult)
Plus, such a hive is going to be difficult to harvest (the point of most human-kept hives) has a much greater surface to volume ratio, so you'll have to provide climate control yourself, or at least really good insulation, rather than letting the bees take care of it themselves.