RE: BeeWatch: LoRaWAN Environmental Monitoring – Blog 1: README.TXT

DAB — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 19:33:02 GMT

Nice plan, I look forward to your build and data.

Bees are very important, both in pollinating plants, but I am also a Mead connoisseur.

RE: BeeWatch: LoRaWAN Environmental Monitoring – Blog 1: README.TXT

beacon_dave — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 20:01:31 GMT

"...It also may not prove so useful, given that bees are agile and fly rapidly, which means images may not be particularly clear (assuming you could lure them in with a flower-analogue and some nectar)..."

I've noticed that when I have some bee-friendly Allium Sphaerocephalon growing in the garden, the bees will land on them, crawl over them for a bit then hop over to the next un-occupied flower, crawl over it and so on. So, you could potentially get images something like this:

https://community.rspb.org.uk/resized-image/__size/400x600/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-25-81/7127.bumble-CU-on-allium-sphaero.jpg

As there are 100's of petals on each head, the bees will spend quite some time working through them all before moving onto the next one, and in this case, you probably get a better chance of getting them from multiple angles than from a single flower they crawl into. So choosing your flowers carefully might help keep a captive audience. Also, apparently different bees have different lengths of tongue, which affects which flowers they can feed from.

Caning the stalk to reduce sway in the breeze would help keep things in camera frame and perhaps tying multiple stocks together to get more stability and more petals to fill the frame might help.

I suspect you could do some classification type stuff but ideally you need to get the thorax, abdomen and tail in view to get all the colour markings for identification. You could also monitor date, time of day, amount of activity, etc.

The plant changes its appearance over time however as it gets visited by the bees so would likely need to consider this with training images.

RE: BeeWatch: LoRaWAN Environmental Monitoring – Blog 1: README.TXT

genebren — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:17:06 GMT

Sounds very interesting. I hope you find a way to help the Bees stay happy and healthy. They need all the help that we can give them.

RE: BeeWatch: LoRaWAN Environmental Monitoring – Blog 1: README.TXT

robogary — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 14:50:06 GMT

Enjoyed this well written introduction