That’s why Cyril Monette, a PhD researcher/roboticist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is developing robotic beehive frames. His discoveries promise to reveal the fundamental principles underlying honeybee decision-making and honey storage. These models include 64 temperature sensors. By quantifying temperature throughout the ten different compartments, they give novel and important clues to how bees cope with their environment and how they regulate their honey stores.
The frames transform a camera-free monitoring colony into an experimental honeybee robotic arm—equipped for long-term, large-scale studies. Each frame consists of 20 honeycomb patches. This installation provides a remarkable opportunity to further examine how bees use their space when it comes to honey storage. Monette’s zealous pursuit has taken her across several continents in search of honey stores. She’ll be quantifying how many are out there through time to uncover the fascinating hierarchy of a hive.
Monette’s work is part of a broader initiative by EPFL researchers to enhance understanding of honeybee behavior through innovative technology. By creating a robotic observation hive, they hope to explore bee behavior in relation to honey storage, offering a fresh perspective on these vital pollinators.
Features of the Robotic Frames
The robotic beehive frames Monette and his team have created are precision-keyed. Each of the ten regions inside a frame has 4-6 temperature sensors to detect fluctuations in heat. This configuration allows heating of each area separately. It allows scientists to reproduce a range of real-world environmental scenarios and test how bees react.
This new and exciting approach provides the research team to observe bee behavior in a more natural setting. This carefully controlled and serene sanctuary is essential to accurate observation.
“The isolated observation hive was built that way to allow for automated observation thanks to cameras or direct observation.”
Furthermore, the robotic frames were the enabler for wide-ranging experimentation. Using these tracking methods, researchers are able to measure how bees move around the hive and what factors affect their behavior toward storing honey. Monette emphasizes the importance of creating an environment that encourages natural bee behavior:
Monette’s research has been focused on figuring out how bee movement is related to where honey ends up in the hive. She’s particularly interested in understanding these dynamics in longitudinal perspective. The first obstacle to tackle has been how to accurately gauge the quantity of honey stored in each area. This task gets even more challenging in the absence of live bees. Due to the unique thermal properties of honey, this endeavor has been remarkably effective.
“Unless we provide an environment that allows the bees to behave naturally, the observations yielded can only approximate how intact and strong colonies behave.”
Understanding Bee Behavior and Storage Patterns
He hopes these observations will someday not only help broaden our understanding of honeybee behavior, but spark more interest in similar ecological studies.
Francesco Mondada, head of Monette’s lab, the Mobots Laboratory at EPFL, shares his vision for pushing bee research further. He envisions that incorporating ethology within robotics will result in never before seen observations of bee behavior in close-to-natural settings.
“We’re interested in studying the relation between bee movement, their lifecycles, and correlations with honey location within the hive over time.”
Monette and his team are trying to get a better sense of what’s happening with honeybees today. They’re working to develop a national map of honey resources and monitor U.S. colony demographics over time. He’s especially keen to see how the bee ball—a cluster that forms for warmth—shifts around during winter months.
This research could lead to groundbreaking discoveries that enhance understanding of honeybee dynamics and their adaptation to environmental changes.
“By combining ethology and robotics we can make unprecedented observations of bees in nearly fully natural conditions, revealing behaviors never observed with this precision,” Mondada explains. “This allows us to challenge and improve existing hypotheses on honeybee behavior and at the same time learn techniques that can help us to protect bees.”
The Future of Honeybee Research
Monette and his team’s work not only aims to provide insights into current honeybee behaviors but also seeks to map honey resources and colony demographics over time. He is particularly interested in observing how the bee ball—a cluster that forms for warmth—moves throughout winter months.
“With our robotic observation hive, I’m hoping to map honey resources and colony demographics over time, observe how the bee ball moves throughout the winter, and provide a framework for other ecological studies such as studying the impact of heatwaves on colonies,” Monette notes.
This research could lead to groundbreaking discoveries that enhance understanding of honeybee dynamics and their adaptation to environmental changes.