Monitoring the Hive with Broodminder's Rich and Lorenzo (305)

305 - Monitoring the Hive with Broodminder's Rich and Lorenzo

James Naeger: Hello, this is James Naeger from Troy, Michigan. I've been making mead professionally for over a decade, but I've just started keeping honeybees for the last two years. I've always turned to this podcast for reliable science-based advice that is also extremely entertaining. That has made a huge difference in my beekeeping journey. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

[music]

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast, presented by Better Bee. Your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episodes' transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Thanks, James for that fantastic opening up in Troy, Michigan. Becky, are you a mead drinker?

Becky: I would've said no if you had asked me four days ago, but I was at this fantastic Washington State Beekeepers Association meeting over the weekend where I got a taste of the very best blueberry mead or mead I've ever tasted. Blueberry flavor, very tart. I'm not a sweet person on many levels, but it was just amazing. Now, I am. Now that I know that mead can come in more than one flavor profile, it just doesn't have to be sweet, oh, it was John Jacob in Washington who made the most amazing-- no, Oregon. He's from Oregon. Did I go on way too much about that? You didn't expect that, did you, Jeff?

Jeff: No and I wasn't invited to that mead party. I was at the meeting as I recall, and I just-

Becky: Oh, the meeting after the meading was awesome.

Jeff: I'm never invited to those. That's where all the smart kids go or all the popular kids go.

Becky: In our defense, we were right out there in the open. It's just that everybody else left us and went to bed.

[laughter

Let's get to this Michigan mead maker who became a beekeeper. Isn't that a smart move for his mead business? I love that.

Jeff: I think if he has a display or a shop for his mead but having an observation hive, the bees in the background would be a great selling point.

Becky: It really would be. Good idea. That's the Frank Linton episode that you're directing him to, the observation hives.

Jeff: Oh, yes, that is right. Thanks a lot, James, for that intro. We greatly appreciate it and the kind words you included. Hey, Becky, it is November. It's a good time to get educated as a beekeeper and to get caught up in the readings and understand the honeybees.

Becky: Otherwise known as planning the next beekeeper year. It is time to start planning what kind of beekeeper you want to be in 2025.

Jeff: That's right. Looking through catalogs, going through old equipment, and repairing it, there's a lot of work to be done, not all of it on the bees, but there's a lot of work that it's better to get it done now and not wait till the springtime when you're rushing to get it done.

Becky: It's always good to be ahead of the beekeeping equipment game instead of one super behind it, so yes.

Jeff: I tend to put things off to the last minute. Maybe it's not putting it off. I have higher-priority items that jump up in front of me and beekeeping tasks often get pushed. Which ones are your least favorite to work on?

Becky: Do you see the silence?

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: I really love beekeeping-

[laughter]

-so let's see.

Jeff: I like it. Oh.

Becky: Let's see. I really do love the putting together of what the colonies are going to look like next year. I love trying to put together what I learned from beekeepers at meetings and in yards and honestly on this podcast and what I want to incorporate. I can't tell you what the least favorite-- oh, but are you asking me what I'm not good at and what I don't do, which is technology?

[laughter]

Jeff: We're definitely going to get to technology here in a little bit, Becky.

Becky: I think we could all be better at recording data. I have a very complex brick system.

Jeff: Brick system.

Becky: I'm having a hard time letting that go. Planning a data collection system and hive numbering system is something I'm behind on.

Jeff: I never know how to actually number the hives. My task that I often put off to the last minute till I need them is repairing or preparing frames.

Becky: That's a pile that my husband takes care of for me.

[laughs]

It's so much easier.

Jeff: That's not fair.

Becky: He doesn't help me with the bees, but I tell you when he gets to take that air compressor out and do whatever he does to fix things, he's on it.

Jeff: It works, huh?

Becky: That's your job in your apiary.

Jeff: No, I don't have anybody to delegate to in my yard. I don't even have a dog to follow me out to the bee yard. Speaking of technology, today's guests, Rich Morris from Broodminder and Lorenzo Pons who we've not talked to before, but he's also part of Broodminder and we'll find out a little bit more about that relationship.

Becky: I have a feeling I'm going to be very quiet during this hour, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Jeff: Becky, I'm sure you will find many questions as they talk about how they integrate their technology in the bees and how they use it to observe the bees. It'll be fun. We'll invite them in right after this quick word from our sponsors.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey, thanks a lot. Sitting across this great, big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table stretching all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the southwestern part of France, I have Rich Morris of Broodminder and Lorenzo Pons of Broodminder. Welcome guys to the show.

Rich Morris: Thank you, Jeff.

Lorenzo Pons: Hi.

Rich: Thank you, Becky.

Becky: It's so nice to meet both of you. Jeff, our part of the table, Rich and I are almost right next to each other because he's in Wisconsin, I'm in Minnesota. We've got quite the table going on here.

Rich: We're very global.

Jeff: Lorenzo and I are at the ends I suppose.

Becky: You've got a midwestern section of the table and that's pretty solid.

[laughter]

Jeff: Well represented. There's got to be an election joke in there somewhere, but I'll just let that go right now.

Rich: No, let it go.

[laughter]

Jeff: I've been looking forward to this. Becky's been excited too. I won't tease her. I was going to say we've had fun in the past about Becky and technology, but I won't tease her publicly for once.

Becky: You just did.

Jeff: Oh, okay.

[laughter]

Becky: You just did.

Jeff: Lorenzo and Rich, you both are Broodminder. I'll throw the question out. For our listeners who aren't familiar with Broodminder or are familiar with the name but don't know anything about Broodminder, one of you or both of you, give us a quick introduction one to yourselves and how you got interested in bees, and then we'll go into what is Broodminder and what does Broodminder do.

Rich: I'll start. I'm Rich Morris and I founded Broodminder about nine years ago now with the intention to know here in Wisconsin when my bees died, because it seemed like seven out of eight years they would die. I thought, "Okay, if I have one data point, that's a start of figuring out what's going on." As I was changing jobs, we've started Broodminder and we've found out a lot more since then, of course. We measure temperature and humidity inside the hive, we measure weight, we measure bee activity, and then we've got this huge pile of software that takes all of that, pushes it up to the cloud.

That's where we more or less turn it over to Lorenzo. You take it from there, Lorenzo.

Lorenzo: I have a background of mechanical engineering on aerospace and I've been working a lot of time with data-driven processes on trying to improve things or creating new tools. The idea when I started with the bee stuff and beekeeping since 20 years more or less, but I wanted to understand what was going on into those boxes because it's not very clear when you look at them and more on the data processing because I'm not electronic engineer as Rich is. I started dealing with the data, but we also needed sensors and that's how we met. We started working together, you need the hardware, you need the software, you need the user experience.

This idea is staying exactly the same after seven years. We have this vision, which is not changing.

Rich: Just briefly, the Broodminder team is give or take eight people. A few of our staff are paid because they're young and need some salary. Some of our staff are older and established enough that we're not paid. It's a combination volunteer organization. We're all beekeepers, we're all just passionate about trying to put some analytics behind, it depends, which seems to be the answer to every question I've ever asked in beekeeping.

Jeff: Oh yes, I can remember that was probably Kim Flottum's catchphrase, it depends.

Rich: [laughs] It depends.

Jeff: Every answer started that way. That's a great introduction. You're more on the hardware side, Lorenzo's on the software side, bringing together this user experience that helps beekeepers have a better understanding of what's going on inside their hives even when they're not there. I've mentioned Broodminder on several occasions because you've developed a standard for hive monitoring that is well-founded in the technology and the software. It's good to use for beekeepers.

Rich: We are all driven by the data and we all have experience similar to Lorenzo's that I was in medical ultrasound and osteoporosis for a number of years. It's all about being able to look at this widely variable data. No two hives are the same, but yet like in osteoporosis, you can still know that there's a risk of things going wrong, a fracture risk. We're looking at the data with those eyes and so we've developed all these tools for our engineering minds. At the same time, what's driven us more than anything, and this all aim at Becky, is that if we were only collecting data from engineers and scientists, we wouldn't get the whole story.

We've gone way out of our way to try to make it very accessible. I always use the example of I want my mom to be able to use it. She's 92 now, so a little tougher now, but in her mid-80s, she had no problem using our equipment and getting data because that's the most important thing is to get a wide variety of data so that we can see these overall patterns. Not just my hive or your hive, but the whole thing. So far we've shipped about 35,000 sensors around the globe and we're starting to get that picture and that's where it's really getting exciting for us.

Becky: Rich, I have to ask if you are shipping sensors to beekeepers, I get it that it's called Broodminder, but what is your guideline for where to put the sensor because everybody has different hive configurations?

Rich: They do. You have to start out with an idea and what we call archetypes. We've got several different archetypes. One is a university person they are doing their thing, but our primary archetype was the backyard beekeeper. When we went into it, we said, "Okay, these are people." We just said, "Okay, we're going to start with the standard langstroth hive because that is by far the most popular." Our sensors, no one in the podcast is seeing it, but basically the temperature sensor lays right on top of the brood nest. You break your boxes apart and it lays right on top of the frame.

The cool thing is that since heat rises, it comes up from the brood, so it spreads out in between the boxes because the frames above it are holding it there. Then you get a remarkably accurate picture of the brood temperature during brood season, during raising season. In the winter then we move it to the top of the box because heat rises and the cluster is going to move around. That picks up, and in the winter, in Wisconsin, I'm centric to that, but then if it's warmer inside than outside, something's alive in there, so that's easy to detect.

Becky: You're thinking it's standardized to a two-box Langstroth system, so two deeps?

Rich: It works really well with one or two. We put one above each brood box.

Becky: Okay, so multiple sensors.

Rich: What we find is that the temperature doesn't telegraph through the second box. Typically we, if a person had one sensor, because the entry point is just a temperature sensor because that's going to tell you the most about everything. We say put it above the brood box if the brood moves up, move the sensor up above the brood box. If you can't afford it, putting one above each, then you can see as the brood grows into the second box.

The super cool thing the bees do is that when they're raising brood, they thermal regulate to 95 F and it just becomes crystal clear, let's say in the spring here, typically in February, March this year was early-- you just see that go from tracing the outdoor temperature with some offset to being regulated within a degree. It's really remarkable how strongly they regulate as they build up their population. That shows up really clearly. The other super cool thing that we didn't know going into it was that when they swarm, there's about a 4°F temperature bump for about 20 minutes. We watch for that and we find out they swarm or it also will happen when a queen does a virgin flight and those sorts of things.

We see a lot, we also measure weight, weight's honey, honey's nectar, nectar's blooming, blooming's climate. We share that with the land grant colleges. It's a really good climate indicator. Our data's public domain, and then I think Jeff has one now that the BeeDar which is an entrance counter essentially. Those are the things we do. Then we've got a series of either your phone or a hub that gets it from the devices up to the cloud.

Jeff: I'll jump right in here right now just to make sure that everyone's clear that the sensors I have and I use I've paid for and this is not a sponsorship spot for Broodminder, but as a interest to beekeeper who's techie and geeky in the way I like to look at things or I've learned to look at things, this is the standard I've settled on. I just make sure that that's clear. I use technology.

Rich: I'll just say philosophically, we don't give away stuff to influencers and we are very science-based. We really resist making any claims that we haven't proven. Like I said, our team is eight beekeepers and we make sure it works

Jeff: Regarding the temperature sensors and you talked about the sensitivity and the swarm alert that I found a high correlation between the swarm alert and a conference call starting.

[laughter]

I find that it's inevitable that in the spring I'll have a work-related conference call start and I'll see that spike and an alert that a swarm is happening.

Rich: I'm sorry about that Jeff. [laughs]

Jeff: Yes, it's just science. It just happens.

Rich: That's because the queen has a meeting too and she's going too.

Jeff: Oh, well, Rich, at Broodminder you have temperature sensor, humidity sensor, several different types of scales, the BeeDar, which is a lighter, and a vibration sensor, I guess.

Rich: It's actually a radar RF as opposed to laser, but it's a radar that is looking at the bees flying in and out. It looks at the Doppler shift and it was developed by a friend of ours in Maine Herb Aumann Then it also listens to the vibration of the hive and just gives you an overall sound level of the hive. When they get worked up, like when they're swearing or if they're being attacked by a possum or those sorts of things.

Jeff: The way to get it from the hive to your computer monitor would either be through the phone app or you have a couple of different hub-type arrangements for getting the information, gathering the information, and either sending it up to the cloud or collecting it so that you can pick it up at a later time.

Rich: Right. I'll just say that going into this nearly 10 years ago, I thought, "Oh, a data logger, that's easy." We have 13 or 15 different software packages that splice all this stuff together and it drives me a little bit crazy, but because we wanted to work and Amanda and [unintelligible 00:21:05] and Maxim and Lorenzo and I, we've all worked really hard to make it easy to use and reliable.

Jeff: Just getting the mobile phone apps to work together and provide reliable information with all the different Android versus iOS versus different operating systems and versions out there. Not to mention tablets. I don't know why you all have hair, you'd want to pull it out.

Rich: It's complicated also by the fact that as a good engineer, as soon as we're done with something, we want to redo it better. We've gone through while we're just introducing our W-5 scale, which you bought one of those early prototypes, which is so much better than the W-1. Why it's taken us 10 years to get there, I guess we just keep trying to improve them.

Jeff: I look forward to seeing the final product. Let's take a quick break and hear from a couple of sponsors and then we'll be right back to talk to Lorenzo and how he takes all of that data and makes it useful for us beekeepers.

[music]

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Becky: Welcome back everybody. Lorenzo, would you share what you are doing for Broodminder to facilitate the user experience?

Lorenzos: Oh yes, sure. We're trying to take that raw data that all the devices are harvesting every hour and give it some sense. Let's say talking from the-- instead of talking engineering, talking beekeeper jargon. I don't want to talk temperature, I want to talk quantity of brood, or I don't want to talk weight, I want to talk productivity, for example. Or swarm or whatever. That's what we are trying to do. We are trying to transform the data into actionable data and telling the beekeeper, "Okay, your brood level is at 80% and it's going up," or "No, the brood level is going down." That kind of information.

This has been a long journey because, as you said before, there's different kind of hives, different architectures, and you want to have something that will work all around the world, some algorithms that are also making sense of different climate zones or different weather conditions. We're trying to figure out what's best and we are improving those algorithms all the time because we get feedback from beekeepers that are telling us, "Hey, I am observing that thing in my apiary," so we go and check and see, okay, how we can make it better.

Becky: A follow-up, you said brood amount. If you are able to detect a change in the amount of brood, that could tell me if my colony has a queen issue, or potentially if the queen is slowing down because she's going to swarm or if she's slowing down laying where there might be a super seizure. Is that the direction you're going into?

Lorenzo: We can tell. If I take the whole year in a single chart, you will see when the brood is over because the queen has stopped laying for overwintering, for example, in cold regions, let's say in October or November. Then you know that this is a good moment for oxalic acid treatment, for example. Without opening the hives, just looking at the charts, you can see when she starts laying again in January or February, and this depends a lot on the climate or the weather conditions of that year.

Sometimes you can have a break of one and a half months, sometimes you will have a break of 15 days. Depending off what you read in the sensors, you know you can treat with oxalic for example. You also know when the varroa counter has resumed because if they start laying again, let's say beginning of January, there's more mites in summer than if they had started laying in February.

Rich: The other nice thing that Lorenzo and the younger people in the group have brought is also even just the user experience with the focus of how we look at data. I'm a boomer and I love looking at it in my web browser on my pc. I can see the big picture and everything else. Lorenzo made a big push when we had our global summit a year ago, June, to say, "This needs to be more focused on the cell phone that you can do more."

We could do a lot with it, but really he wanted the experience to be much better in the apiary with the cell phone. That's not how I look at data, but that's how he looks at data. Amanda's in her 30s, that's how she looks at it. We have a very dispersed team and that's really important because they did an overhaul to the Bees app, our cell phone app last summer, last winter, and made some big changes purely for that to make that possible. Lorenzo even did a video demonstrating his trip to his apiary, and how you use it, how you use this information.

It's not important that we're gathering it, it's all about, okay, if this isn't actionable data, we're wasting our time. That's always our true goal is to say, "How do we use this data to make beekeeping better?"

Jeff: Lorenzo was saying how you can watch, monitor the queen when she starts and stops, and that was seasonal-specific. I also saw it in September when I did my Formic Pro or my Formic treatments and I saw the drop off of the hive temperature and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I've killed yet another queen." I was wailing and gnashing my teeth, and listeners probably can remember those episodes, and I know Becky does.

That I'd killed her, but if I'd waited a little bit longer, I saw the temperature start rising and I could see that she'd come back online and they were raising brood again, and it's just like, "Wow, that was really cool. I was not expecting that."

Rich: I'm going to hijack the conversation for a second here, because another thing that we're really passionate about at this same meeting a year and a half ago and talking about moving from data collection to user utilization. Theo Hartmann, who's been one of my partners from the get-go, he has worked extremely hard over the last 12, 14 months on queen replacement on-- we really say hive in transition. One of the big problems we hear from people is, when you lose a queen, what do you do? How long do you wait before you let them make a new queen? When should you not go in the hive because the larvae might be turning over doing these different things?

All of this stuff is calendar-based. We know the biology of the bee, we know all that, but how do you turn that from an observation? It can be as little as one observation, they swarmed or you put in this. How do you turn that into a process where you give advice? It may be that "Oh look, your hive is now bloodless. It's a great time to do an OAV." Our big goal for next spring is to take what-- and it's been a two-year process. He basically started with about 65 pages of flow chart. Then we're translating that into a logic table and he's got amazing spreadsheets that he has tracked.

He runs about 60 hives, so he's tracked all year, all of these forms, all of the queen replacements, all of those sorts of things, and broken it down. That's going to be implemented into our app next year. Along with, we have some built-in things like when we see the temperature rise, okay, that's an event. That might be a swarm. It might be an after-swarm, but once you have both dates, you can look backwards and say, "Oh, was this the primary swarm? Was this the after-form? What does that mean for queen replacement?" You'd mentioned Jeff that you just waited.

That's the number one reply we got from Eddie AS that we were talking to people said, when someone loses a queen, a lot of newbies want to immediately say, "Oh, I got to get a queen. I got to put a new queen in there." Wait. It may take-- and it varies from as little-- I think Theo said 20 days and he had some that took 60 days to replace. If you're observing a couple of times along the way, you can know where you are in that process, and know if you need to take action or need to leave them alone. It was an exciting and really difficult thing we've been trying.

Jeff: I call myself sometimes a time-crunched beekeeper, and I can't get into the hive as much as I want to, or I have to be efficient with the time that I do have and having the insight of knowing based on the combined knowledge that I see on the temperature and weights. Even the BeeDar I can say, "Wow, geez, everything's hunky dory there in that hive, but over here I see a hive that's lagging behind the others. This one needs my attention.

If I only have an hour to work on the bees this afternoon, I'm going to focus my attention on this hive, or at least two hives as opposed to doing a preemptive inspection on all my hives in an available time slot. That's a value that I see as a beekeeper who also has a full-time job otherwise.

Lorenzo: It is great that you say this because that's the ultimate vision. There are three stages let's say. We started making charts that you are watching on your computer and trying to identify what was going on. That's more for engineers. Now we have an app which is also showing you some charts, but also showing you brood or productivity, which is already talking beekeeping jargon, and you can look at this and assess the different hives you have.

The third level what we are targeting over the next years is having you not pull the information, but we push you the information. We tell you the nectar flow is over, or the nectar flow is starting, or this blooming will happen in five days, or this brood level for that hive is not normal at that given time of the year, so you should maybe watch that hive. The idea here is, okay, we are all very busy, and pulling information on a computer is hard and on the phone is more easy because you can find a moment to do it.

If we could really push the essential information to the beekeeper to let you know where you are, that would be absolutely great for you, for your bees, and for the whole experience.

Becky: May I ask, because there's a point at which if you're a backyard beekeeper, you can put a sensor in every hive, but when you have a smaller operation, maybe 50, 100, couple hundred hives with multiple locations, you still have a lot of users in that category. How are they using Broodminder?

Lorenzo: In particular in Europe, you have commercial beekeepers with, let's say 400 or 500 hives, so this already means 20 apiaries or 30 apiaries. They are not instrumenting everything because you need to manage the sensors. The good compromise is one or two scales, because they are on each apiary because they are watching for the nectar flow. Then three, four internal sensors because we learned to combine the brood information with the scale information.

You watch it together, and that's telling you much more than a single scale because if you have a single scale on a strong hive and the nectar flow arrives, the scale is telling you, "Hey, we have plenty of supers filled up and you need to come to add another one." This isn't the case you don't know what the brood is inside, but if the sensor of the brood is telling you, "Hey, brood is 90%." Okay, you know that that colony is making the best of the whole apiary and so the information is not the same, you're not reacting the same way.

Becky: Will you just explain to me brood at 90% or brood at 50%, what does that mean?

Lorenzo: We are not telling you have five or six or seven frames of brood, because actually we don't know what kind of hive you have. We don't know if it's an 8 frame or a 10 or a 12. We are giving a percentage, and you as a beekeeper get used to those figures in your usual way to work with it and you know at the end what means 80% or what means 50%.

Becky: It's standardized and once you see the data on your phone, and then you're in your hive, you're able to connect those numbers?

Lorenzo: Right. [crosstalk]

Rich: I'll also mention the BeeDar, talk about that briefly in the commercial stuff. We did it mainly for the commercial people in Europe. We did it for Lorenzo actually.

Lorenzo: The BeeDar was something absolutely great. I will never forget that, because up to the BeeDar, you have only two different ways to count bees. You have those entrance counters which are infrared, and also some sensitive to the like, and you have camera counters, with artificial intelligence. Both of them are intrusive. You need to put something at the entrance of the hive, and then arrived this BeeDar from Herb Aumann in Maine University.

Rich made all the integration the system together with Broodminder and so on. Great. She shipped me to BeeDar here. "Okay, take the BeeDar." What I'm doing with this thing? I don't know how it will be used. I don't understand it. Okay, let's hook it to one hive. It happens that I had some of those gate counters with the infrared stuff, and one night I started to watch at the BeeDar signal, it's just telling you a signal. It's a RMS signal. Is nothing about bees.

I started comparing the data, and of course, when you compare potatoes with carrots you're not finding anything reasonable, but you start putting things together and making a coefficient or something like this. Then you realize that this BeeDar is really, really giving you the same distribution of bees over the day than the other counter. I remember there was still Aumann online, it was late at night, but Virginia was still awakened. We were both of us looking at this and saying, "Oh, can you try to multiply by this commission? Let's see what happens. Oh, go. Yes, that's crazy. It's very good."

[laughter]

You realize that this BeeDar is new and it's a radar, and it's just counting bees in such a way. Giving you the whole distribution, and we are using it right now in pollination. In Europe for sunflower or for QE, but also in America we've been doing almonds in California and next year we'll also do cherry in Washington state. It's a great, great tool.

Rich: Also for bumblebees you've done some stuff with that.

Lorenzo: Right. This was even another challenge, because counting bees you have many of them going through, but bumblebees you have about one every 30 seconds going out on a bumblebee hive.

Jeff: Speaking of the BeeDar, you had a novel use of the be-- I thought it was novel. Novel use of the BeeDar this last spring with the solar eclipse. Can you talk about that Rich?

Rich: Yes, that was just a random thing out of the blue. Of course, being sciencey I was all excited about the eclipse and I got to watch it in my aunt's backyard. That was wonderful. Brock Harpur at Purdue sent a note and said, "You guys have some sensors along the eclipse path, don't you?" I said, "Yes." He connected me with Barrett Klein at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Barrett and Brock had done a small study about the bee dance during the eclipse seven years ago.

I got talking with Barrett, and he's super enthusiastic and Brock is super enthusiastic and we decided we will reach out to our group of beekeepers because they're also super enthusiastic about this stuff, for some people to observe the dance during the Eclipse and take videos and whatnot. Also, we've got this BeeDar thing, and it would be really interesting to send that. I got a couple of hundred parts. We had to build them up, put the parts on the shelf. We got four weeks before the eclipse [chuckles], we probably could pull this off.

We got to our friends, you included and [unintelligible 00:40:59] and different people around to put out the word in our newsletter for people who were on the eclipse path, if they wanted to install a BeeDar, we would send them one. We would loan them one for a few weeks. Basically, it would be running. They attach it to their hive and wait for the eclipse to happen and mail it back to us.

We did that. We got 150 of these out everywhere from Southern Texas to, Aumann sold one in Maine. There was not much going on, bee activity-wise. What was that? April. The data is out on our public domain site, beecounted.org under BeeDar, and anyone could look at it. Dr. Harper is in the process of writing a paper about it. It was really interesting to look at because it showed some unexpected things. Almost everything in beekeeping as soon as you look at it and you say, "Oh, of course, that's what's happening."

Texas didn't have great weather, so the data was a little mushy there. We still saw that the bees come back when the eclipse was happening and go out. In central Indiana, and coincidentally, one of the best sites was about three miles from where I grew up, what you would see is that they come out, and it was a beautiful day in central Indiana. They come out, you see the population build-up and you're seeing the activity, and then as the eclipse starts, it starts falling back on the number of inferences and exits. About five minutes before totality, it railed.

You can see everybody rushing home and then as soon as totality started, zero. Everybody who didn't make it was maybe locked out somewhere. Then four minutes later when it was over, you see this other big bump with the bees coming back. Brock is looking at the activity versus distance from the center of the eclipse and including weather. He's putting out a paper this fall, and it was just a fun project. It cost us some effort, but it was very rewarding to send these out in very short amount of time and then to get them back and read that data. We ended up with one-minute data for the day of the eclipse, which is just awesome.

Jeff: You got them all back?

Rich: We got 149 of them back.

Becky: Oh-oh. Did you want to take a minute to call up to number 150? No, I'm kidding.

[laughter]

Jeff: Who was that beekeeper?

Rich: I contacted them numerous times and pleaded and everything else because it was-- that's the way it goes.

Jeff: There's always one.

Rich: In the name of science.

Jeff: Time is flying as I was afraid it would because I could talk like this all day. I know that you have future directions and future efforts that you're working on as any technology company. In our short amount of time that we have left, what are you working on that you'd like to talk to our listeners about?

Rich: We covered a little bit of it, that the hive transition logic is a big one and it's a really complicated one that we're working on. We have a new scale coming out, that's fine but the big one that we've been working on for about five years is a Mite Minder. Enemy number one, varroa mite. We did a phase one small business innovative research grant with the National Science Foundation.

As part of that, we interviewed about 60 beekeepers of various yorks and we really found that about 1/3 of people test for mites. No problem, it makes sense, we're going to do this. About 1/3 of the people hate doing it, but we'll do it because it's important. About 1/3 of people refuse to do it because why would I want to kill any bees when I'm trying to save the bees? Which is difficult for us all to deal with. The Mite Minder we're putting out, and I just sent a sample to Jeff to put in his hive. Right now it's at a stage we're calling BeeTV.

The approach that we can only come up with that would work is to put a TV camera right in the middle of the brood nest. We know the mites are in the brood nest. We know they're on the bellies of the bees. Our camera illuminates the bees with four different wavelengths of light, collects 10 seconds of data every half an hour on these, and then we're getting those back. We'll develop the AI part of it to recognize bees, count bees, count mites, and come up with a mite number in the hive.

It's been very long since we do this seasonally, but we continue to push forward because we think this would be a very valuable thing. Our target price would be $200 if we can hit that, which is very aggressive for putting edge-enabled artificial intelligence video recognition. We think at that point, we could really have an impact on understanding both the mite count for people who don't want to do the testing, but also for researchers looking at mite growth. It would be the sort of system that will give you continuous data, which is always more interesting than counting once a month or once every three months.

That's our big project apart from all of the other projects we always have going. Like I said, we're always trying to improve it. Lorenzo and I are always arguing on how to apply Amanda, myself, himself, Maxine, Mike, Rich Hogel. I'm trying not to leave anyone out. We just got a terrific team and we're having a lot of fun at it. Did I leave out anything, Lorenzo?

Lorenzo: I think another project we've been working for a while and that will be rolling out next spring is this blooming forecast tool. We are trying very hard to predict when the blooming happens, and not just the blooming but all the stages, the birds, and all the different phenological stages, and giving this to the beekeeper to improve the user experience. "Hey, have you watched your black locust? It's about to bloom in two days." That's what we are trying to do. We have a better version of this tool out there for people who would like to test it. It's on our Facebook. The idea is to integrate it into the Bees app by next spring so that you get all that information available.

Becky: It's so important for beekeepers to understand their nectar flows and it's something that isn't necessarily always taught in beekeeping classes, so that's excellent.

Rich: It's still variable now. Ours was two and a half, probably yours too. Two and a half or three weeks early this year.

Becky: Right. No, it was very different. If you were not aware that the colony was that far ahead of the game, then the temperature was rising four degrees often in the colony. All swarms were leaving.

Rich: Yes.

Lorenzo: Nectar flow is super important and that's a target. Then when we started saying, How we can deal with nectar flows?" The first thing is knowing when it blooms and then when we know when it blooms, we can maybe talk about the nectar flow. That's what we've been focusing over the last three years with beekeepers around the globe and saying, "Hey, how is your blooming going?" Then we were behind them, calibrating our models, testing things, finding out that this is not GDD, growing degree days was not working, trying something else. I think we have something right now which is pretty good, very focused on black locusts over the last years but it should work on apples.

It should work on any kind of tree that is perennial, or something like this.

Becky: Are you looking at all at the NASA nectar flow map in the United States.

Lorenzo: This was an inspiration. It's a great map and you see the climate zones and so on. Part of what is in the model is using those ideas.

Becky: It's a great map and we can put it in the show notes but I think what's really important is that it is not something that anybody is actively working to support. Even though it is still there, we've needed the next step. It sounds like you might be working on the next step which is just critical for beekeepers to access that information and be able to understand how it impacts their colonies and their apiaries.

Lorenzo: It'll be a citizen science project because if people can tell you, "Hey, my blooming happened yesterday." That's the data point, and you know where's the apiary, and you know what was the weather that year in this apiary. This is great. The problem is that if you ask people, "Hey, tell me when your black locust is blooming," they won't be looking every day, they won't be going, "Oh, is it today or maybe tomorrow?" If you have an app and the app is already telling you, "Hey, it should be tomorrow." Maybe we're wrong, maybe it's in three days, but the beekeeper is already warned and he will take the data point, the right one, right?

Becky: There are beekeepers out there who know this information but we have fewer and fewer of them. I like the idea that you're trying to make more and more of them.

Jeff: Gentlemen, it's been too much fun for me. My time is coming to a wrap here. Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you want to quickly tell our listeners about Broodminder in either past, present, future?

Rich: The one thing I will mention is this is a passion project for us and so we're constantly battling between charging enough money for this and also making it as inexpensive as we can for people because our payoff is getting these things out there and getting and understanding the data. We recently just this week introduced a new subscription model that we think will help push that further. Also, our hubs, they use cell towers and they cost money and all that sort of stuff so as we've gone on, we've tried to understand more of the economics of all these things and try to put it so that we have the best, easiest to use product that we can. It's a multi-variant puzzle.

We just keep doing that. We desperately enjoy getting feedback from our users, be that good feedback or where we're missing because we just want to do the best we can. I guess that's the last plea I'll have is that if people are having trouble, we want to know because we want to make it better for the next person.

Becky: We're approaching the holiday season so it is a great time to add something from your catalog.

Rich: We always have a Black Friday deal going on so come in early and we'll make sure that it's on our website.

Jeff: Just about everything but the scale would be a good stocking stuffer.

[laughter]

Guys, it's been great fun. Thank you for joining us today. I look forward to future updates from you.

Rich: It's always nice talking with you, Jeff. Good to meet you, Becky, and we're having a wonderful fall. Hope you're having it up there in Minnesota also.

[music]

Becky: Absolutely. Such a pleasure to meet both of you, Rich and Lorenzo.

Rich: Thank you.

Jeff: Becky, did you have as much fun talking to those guys about the technology of inside the beehive as I did?

Becky: I had a lot of fun. I want to say that I had more fun because I've watched you enjoy the fact that you're monitoring your colonies but for me to actually hear from them just how powerful their sensors are, I might have had more questions than you did Jeff or I might have asked them. Did I hear right, you're going to be a BeeTV beta tester?

Jeff: Yes, I'm going to have to send it all back, pack it up, and send it back to Rich, and know that down the road I will have contributed to making the product available.

Becky: Excellent. Are you going to do a week's worth of testing what bees are doing when it rains every single day?

Jeff: [laughs] Yes, that's going to be it.

Becky: I told you we started out talking about how much I love beekeeping. If I had this data that I could collect regularly, how much more time would I spend with my bees-

[laughter]

-or thinking about them at least?

Jeff: I think that the amount of time you spend thinking would be the same. You would just be watching something different while you're thinking of them.

Becky: That's the goal. I think I really like data. I don't know, I'm brainstorming how to use it.

[background music]

Jeff: I think I know what I'm going to get you for Christmas. That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally and most importantly, we want to thank you the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:56:29] [END OF AUDIO]