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  • Author Author: ralphjy
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Monitoring Bees in Oregon 2025

ralphjy

I posted earlier about putting out my mason bee houses.  I haven't been very successful with bees nesting the last couple of years so I thought this year that I would put up a camera to monitor the activity at the bee house.  I did a couple of small AI camera projects on Hackster last year so my first thought was that I would try to use one of those to detect bee activity.  The first project was the Dual AI Camera that used a Seeed Grove Vision AI V2 and Xiao ESP32S3 Sense for hummingbird detection and the second was the RPi Zero W Person Sensor Testbed which used an RPi AI Camera with an RPi Zero 2 W for Person Sensor testing.  In either case it would require training and deploying an appropriate model for bee detection.  The other major issue is that it is still raining here quite a lot and neither of these projects is weatherproof so I would need to build waterproof housings.

In the short term I decided that I would deploy a TP-Link Tapo C121 Security Camera that I have.  This is a nice compact and inexpensive 2K IP camera and it is IP66 rated.  It has motion detection and free Smart AI Detection for people, pets, and vehicles.  It also allows for RTSP streaming and local SD storage so that I won't need to access the cloud for recording.  I won't be able to do bee detection (unless I try to deploy a model on Frigate) but for now I'll try to see how it goes just trying to use motion detection.  Hopefully longer term I'll be able to deploy a solar powered dedicated AI camera with a mason bee detection model.

I mounted the camera on a metal garden pole that I used in a previous challenge.  The camera has a magnetic baseplate so it snapped right onto the top flange on the pole.  I tried not to put the camera too close to the bee house so I wouldn't disturb the bees.  I also turned off the visible and IR LEDs and the status LED.

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Unfortunately, I haven't been able to identify mason bees in either the front or back yard yet.  I think when it gets sunnier I'll have more opportunities to see them at rest.  The closest I've gotten so far is that I saw a native bee on a leaf in the front yard but because its wings weren't deployed I couldn't get a clear view of the body to identify it.  Definitely a bee because of the distinct antennae.

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After looking at a couple of detection captures I realized that it may be difficult to reliably identify mason bees vs other insects with the resolution and distance that I'm using.  Here's one where I drew a box around a bug on the right edge of the house.  Not enough resolution to get a clear image even if I zoom in.

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I did see something I thought was a bee on the camera and went out to take some pics with my iPhone.

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But with a zoomed in view it is clearly a housefly.

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I tried limiting the motion detection zones but the camera is still detecting activity (mostly squirrels) along the top of the fence.

The captured video does not contain the bounding boxes so I need to do a screencap to show them.

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I was dismayed to see that a bird showed up looking for a meal.  I wonder if he's gotten any bees.  I guess I'm going to have to put up some sort of screen...

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Massive loss of bee colonies in Oregon

Local news stations are reporting large losses in honey bee hives (60%-75%) in Oregon in 2025.  Quite worrisome for agriculture in the state.

I am mostly focused on native bees currently but I do watch a community honey bee hive that the dogs and I encounter on our walks.  That hive wintered very well.  It had been downsized to just the brood box and a feeder.  In mid-spring I saw that they had added a super and last week there was lots of activity.  Thankfully that hive is doing well.  It bodes well for the nearby wild blackberries this summer.

Parents Comment
  • in reply to ralphjy

    One thing I was pondering about is where the new queens hibernate over winter and what can be done there to improve their survival rate. I've heard of under stone piles, log piles, in compost heaps and under dense clumps of moss and sometimes they dig themselves into the ground.

    Perhaps a bit risky as a number of these are areas that tend to get 'tidied up' toward the end of the garden year and logs often end up in the fireplace to heat homes during the winter.

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  • in reply to beacon_dave

    The whole premise behind leaving the leaves is that the queens commonly burrow in the soil to hibernate and the leaves provide an insulation layer against the frost and snow.

    I have noticed that there are at least 3 distinct types of bumblebee in my yard so there must be a few nests nearby.

    I’ve read that bumblebee hives tend to be small, 50-100 bees.  Makes me wonder why the BeeBox is so large.  Probably the environment control.  I could print one if I scaled it down a bit.

    The other thing that surprised me in researching bumblebees is that their lifespan is so short, 1-4 weeks for workers and drones.

  • in reply to ralphjy

    The leaves here tend to kill off the lawn if they are left lying on it resulting in a major repair job to get it looking respectable again. The wind blows them around so not as if you can leave them alone in some areas.

    I usually have two main types, and two lesser types each year. The carders appear to have replaced the trees in numbers this year, but the buffs are back in abundance. I've not seen sign of a local nest here as yet though.

    They increased the size of the BeeBox for version 2 as apparently their original nest size estimation was wrong. It was briefly mentioned here:

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    https://youtu.be/vkCFBzAdXnw?t=445

    I'm guessing that if you have all the workers of a larger bumblebee variety stuck indoors on a rainy day in summer then they will need enough space to be able to ventilate the nest to help the queen keep it at the right temperature.

    I've seen numbers mention of 50-400 depending on type and up to the size of a small football (soccer ball) so that is about the same as a v4 BeeBox.

    Yes, the queen has a hard job at the start to build up the number of workers to help her get the nest ready for producing the the males and queens.

  • in reply to ralphjy

    "...Probably the environment control..."

    The environment control aspect is perhaps something that could be worked on even just if it were just to protect against the more extreme events.

    Temperature wise I read that the hatched larvae need to be kept at constant 25-32°C, but not sure if the temperature varies between individual species or not. Early Spring here, we went from near heatwave to almost freezing overnight so well below that 25°C lower figure.  

    Humidity has been mentioned as being a problem with some of the earlier designs but not sure what the limits are.

    There is perhaps some scope for a sensor package with data logging to start monitoring these things and potentially even for some dynamic control.

    One of the challenges is that you are limited as to when you can make any physical changes so as not to disturb the occupants. Another is that the bees may interfere with what you try. You may find that servo-controlled louvre mechanism plugged up with mud/grass before it gets the chance to do its thing.