Bee Techno
Technology is also making its way into the beehive: digitalizing a beehive provides new information about the colony members that cannot be seen with the naked eye and helps determine whether new plant protection products are bee-friendly.
Digital monitoring is intended to capture the behavior of bees and thus provide important information for the approval of plant protection products. For the approval of new plant protection products, this data should help illustrate the impact of substances on pollination ability. Until now, the required data has been obtained through lengthy laboratory tests.
A startup in Karlsruhe is working specifically on this and uses a technical entrance control system to monitor not only bee activity but also the proportion of pollen collectors and the pollen intake. Mortality of the bees is also intended to be recorded in the future.
For comparison: the so-called Austrian federal bees, which are located on the roof of the Federal Ministry for Agriculture, Forestry, Regions, and Water Management, are still observed manually once a week by staff member Harald Hör. Since 2014, his colonies have been kept on Vienna’s rooftops.
With proximity to the Stadtpark, the green Prater, the Belvedere, and the Augarten, this is the perfect location to meet all the needs of spring foragers. Not only is a sufficient number of flowers relevant, but also standing water as a source of liquid.
“Only two beehives would be needed to supply Vienna,” explains Harald Hör. However, with such a small number of hives, the bees would need to fly the maximum distance, which, due to high energy demands, can only be sustained with provisions from the hive itself. To circumvent this, thanks to the Vienna community beekeeper and the in-house beekeeper, multiple hives have been placed on Vienna’s rooftops. In addition to their pollination performance, the bees also produce up to 26 kilogram of honey per hive. Overall, approximately 4,100 tons of honey were produced in Austria in 2021/22, which covers only 44 percent of the country’s demand. On average, an Austrian consumes 1 kilogram of honey per year. Increasing honey production and thereby the degree of self-sufficiency is thus important for regional food supply.
In this context, the University of Hohenheim has also published a children’s non-fiction book titled The Swarm (in German only). On 16 double pages, Mister Kirsten Traynor, Head of the State Institute for Bee Research at the University of Hohenheim, introduces young readers to the world of the honeybee.