When the VIBee project started, one of its central questions was deceptively simple: can we monitor honey bee colonies continuously, automatically and without disturbing their natural behaviour?
For decades, researchers have tried to count bees entering and leaving their hives. Such data can reveal daily flight activity, changes in foraging behaviour and potentially even daily losses of forager bees. However, automated bee counters are not just technical gadgets. If they are to be used in ecological research or pesticide risk assessment, their data must be reliable, validated and biologically meaningful.
VIBee helped to move this field forward. The project and its follow-up work contributed to several linked areas: automated bee counting, validation of monitoring devices, pollen resource assessment, colony-level indicators and, most recently, non-destructive in-hive monitoring of brood and pathogens.
