Quantitative assessments of honeybee colony’s response to an artificial vibrational pulse resulting in non-invasive measurements of colony’s overall mobility and restfulness

Bencsik, M. ORCID: 0000-0002-6278-0378, McVeigh, A., Claeys Bouuaert, D., Capela, N., Penny, F., Newton, M.I., Sousa, J.P. and de Graaf, D.C., 2024. Quantitative assessments of honeybee colony’s response to an artificial vibrational pulse resulting in non-invasive measurements of colony’s overall mobility and restfulness. Scientific Reports, 14: 3827. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

In this work we aim to provide a quantitative method allowing the probing of the physiological status of honeybee colonies by providing them with a gentle, short, external artificial vibrational shockwave, and recording their response. The knock is provided by an external electromagnetic shaker attached to the outer wall of a hive, driven by a computer with a 0.1 s long, monochromatic vibration at 340Hz set to an amplitude that occasionally yields a mild response from the bees, recorded by an accelerometer placed in the middle of the central frame of the colony. To avoid habituation, the stimulus is supplied at randomised times, approximately every hour. The method is pioneered with a pilot study on a single colony hosted indoors, then extended onto eight outdoors colonies. The results show that we can quantitatively sense the colony’s overall mobility, independently from another physiological aspect, which is phenomenologically explored. Using this, a colony that is queenless is easily discriminated from the others.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: Scientific Reports
Creators: Bencsik, M., McVeigh, A., Claeys Bouuaert, D., Capela, N., Penny, F., Newton, M.I., Sousa, J.P. and de Graaf, D.C.
Publisher: Springer
Date: 15 February 2024
Volume: 14
ISSN: 2045-2322
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.1038/s41598-024-54107-8DOI
1866132Other
Rights: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions: Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by: Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added: 26 Feb 2024 14:02
Last Modified: 26 Feb 2024 14:02
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/50941

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