Blog 1 - Introduction to the project and challenge in saving bees.

First, I would like to thank element14 for selecting me as one of the official challenger for the save the bees challenge. This is an opportunity for anyone who want to take part in a challenge which deals with saving the Bees which are responsible for pollination. Pollination is a process by which bees and other insects visit the flower/fruit and take the pollen to other plant's stigma which makes it possible to other flower/fruit to grow. Without this process almost no crop on the planet can exist.

Bees are one of the most important species for this process. In the recent past their population is declining sharply specially in some areas due to various reasons. One of the reason for this is climate change and resulting urbanization and pollution of the air, water and atmosphere. Around which bees could not survive. This has poor impact on food production and effects the way we live on this planet.

Other such issue which impacts the population of bees especially in some areas is presence of bee eating birds. Bee-eaters are category of birds which eats bees. These birds are categorized in various sub categories. Mainly in this challenge, I will call them bee-eaters. Bee-eaters have around 5 to 6 inch long body with long tail and long beak. They mainly survive on small insets such as bees for their food. They can spot the flying bee from around 60m of distance and can catch and kill the bee. They rub the bee to remove the stinger an hence avoid the bee venom.

The fact that bee-eaters are problem to the population of the bee not just because they eat them but various other measures also have contributed to the decrease of bees due to Bee-eaters. For example, some bee-keepers got a license to kill the bee-eaters. After they spotted and kill the bee-eater the remaining bees around came and bite the bee-eater, resulting in more bees dying.

In some parts of the world may bee-keepers have started to put stones in bee-eaters nest on the ground and sand walls to protect their bees. But scientist and researchers are finding new ways to keep bees safe from bee-eaters and solutions which are also not harmful to the bee-eaters as well. Recent technology in IoT and embedded systems can help researchers to solve these challenges using smart sensors such as vision, microphone along with tinyml algorithms running on small microcontrollers.

In this challenge, I am going to build a smart device which can detect bee-eaters. The device runs a machine learning model based on edge-impulse which can identify the sound of bee eater and then run another model using image processing to identify the bird around. Both of these models detection results then sent over to the cloud or remote location where they are displayed to the bee-keeper for more information. The plan is also to create some sounds which are not liked by bee-eaters and keeps them away from the bees.

One thing to make sure is that these sounds do not harm the bees themself and only make bee-eaters away from the hive.

References

1>> https://osme.org/2020/09/bee-eaters-and-beekeepers-in-cyprus-a-conflict-with-a-solution/

2>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee-eater