Development of Behavior Monitoring System for Honeybees in Hive Using RFID sensors and Image Processing

Recently, a new research field “Computational Ethology” is attracting much attention from not only biologists but also computer scientists because advances in computer technology enabled to automate the measurement and the analysis of animal behavior. Especially, analyzing communications performed by honeybee workers in their hive is one of the most important and interesting issue in ethological research area to reveal a mechanism of honeybee's language. However, these analyses have been usually conducted by manually extracting honeybee's walking trajectories from recorded long-time video data. For a systematic and theoretical analysis of honeybee's communication, we have developed an automatic tracking algorithm of multiple honeybees using image processing and constructed an automatic recording system for long-term tracking of honeybee behaviors with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors and high-resolution camera modules using multiple small-size single board computers, Raspberry Pi. Using this system, we conducted recording experiments from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm during one month once or twice per a year from 2015 to 2018. In this paper, first we show the overview of a behavior monitoring system of honeybee in hive. Next, we explain the simultaneous tracking algorithm we proposed. Finally, we show the experimental results and confirm the system capabilities.