Effective Searching for the Honeybee Queen in a Living Colony

Abstract

Despite the importance of honeybees as pollinators for the entire ecosystem and their recent decline threatening agricultural production, the dynamics of the living colony are not well understood. In our EU H2020 RoboRoyale project, we aim to support the pollination activity of the honeybees through robots interacting with the core element of the honeybee colony, the honeybee queen. In order to achieve that, we need to understand how the honeybee queen behaves and interacts with the surrounding worker bees. To gather the necessary data, we observe the queen with a moving camera, and occasionally, we instruct the system to perform selective observations elsewhere. In this paper, we deal with the problem of searching for the honeybee queen inside a living colony. We demonstrate that combining spatio-temporal models of queen presence with efficient search methods significantly decreases the time required to find her. This will minimize the chance of missing interesting data on the infrequent behaviors or queen-worker interactions, leading to a better understanding of the queen’s behavior over time. Moreover, a faster search for the queen allows the robot to leave her more frequently and gather more data in other areas of the honeybee colony.