IntelliBeeHive: An Automated Honey Bee, Pollen, and Varroa Destructor Monitoring System

TL;DR

IntelliBeeHive is an affordable, AI-powered monitoring system that uses computer vision to track honey bees, pollen gathering, and Varroa mites in real-time, aiding hive health assessment.

Contribution

This study introduces a cost-effective, AI-based hive monitoring system utilizing YOLOv7-tiny for accurate detection of bees, pollen, and mites without disturbing the hive.

Findings

F1-score of 0.95 for honey bee detection

Detection accuracy of 96.28% for hive activity

High precision and recall for mite detection

Abstract

Utilizing computer vision and the latest technological advancements, in this study, we developed a honey bee monitoring system that aims to enhance our understanding of Colony Collapse Disorder, honey bee behavior, population decline, and overall hive health. The system is positioned at the hive entrance providing real-time data, enabling beekeepers to closely monitor the hive's activity and health through an account-based website. Using machine learning, our monitoring system can accurately track honey bees, monitor pollen-gathering activity, and detect Varroa mites, all without causing any disruption to the honey bees. Moreover, we have ensured that the development of this monitoring system utilizes cost-effective technology, making it accessible to apiaries of various scales, including hobbyists, commercial beekeeping businesses, and researchers. The inference models used to detect honey bees, pollen, and mites are based on the YOLOv7-tiny architecture trained with our own data. The F1-score for honey bee model recognition is 0.95 and the precision and recall value is 0.981. For our pollen and mite object detection model F1-score is 0.95 and the precision and recall value is 0.821 for pollen and 0.996 for "mite". The overall performance of our IntelliBeeHive system demonstrates its effectiveness in monitoring the honey bee's activity, achieving an accuracy of 96.28 % in tracking and our pollen model achieved a F1-score of 0.831.