As bee keepers travel between agricultural areas, they offer their beloved bees as a pollination service to grow delicious fruits and gorgeous flowers for businesses large and small. As the bees fly from flower to flower they collect and transfer pollen in little leg pouches and transfer it into new flowers. But is pollen the only thing these bees are collecting? There are many airborne diseases and fungi that threaten to destroy our fuzzy friends as well as parasites that can hitch an unwanted ride. It only takes one infected bee to spread the disease throughout the hive.
In order to find out if bees do indeed create microclimates, we plan to gather climate data from around the beehives. This data includes temperature, wind velocity, and humidity, which we will then compare to the local climate conditions reported by weather services. While collecting the data from the hives, we want to avoid impacting the bees as much as possible, mainly by keeping a safe height. By our educated estimations we calculate that the safest place to begin would be about six meters above ground level. To see how high the microclimate goes, we will measure various altitudes above the six-meter mark, checking for significant changes against the weather service’s recorded climate conditions from around the beehives.
If we find that bees do create microclimates that coincide with conditions favorable to their afflictions, then the data will be used to create new preventive measures, which bee keepers may implement to better protect their colonies. Such possible solutions include the creation new fungus resistant materials for synthetic hives and developing vaccines and other medicines for combating high risk pathogens and parasites.
A drone flying over a beehive to collect the temperature, humidity, and wind velocity.
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