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\"In this book, young readers will learn about the diet, life cycle, behavior, and habitat of bees. Special emphasis is placed on the bee's hive\"-- Provided by publisher.

The influence of the hive’s design and material on the development and productivity of bee colonies have been studied. Reducing the size of honey cases has positively impacted the bee family’s development. In this case, it is simpler for bees to develop without honey in the nest and regular expansion of the beehive with honey cases. Based on a detailed 3-year analysis of changes in the structure of beehives, we have found the hive’s optimal structure, which makes it possible to maximize the possibilities of bee colonies in the conditions of the Lipetsk region.

Increasing habitat fragmentation and human population growth in Africa has resulted in an escalation in human-elephant conflict between small-scale farmers and free-ranging African elephants (Loxodonta Africana). In 2012 Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) implemented the national 10-year Conservation and Management Strategy for the Elephant in Kenya, which includes an action aimed at testing whether beehive fences can be used to mitigate human-elephant conflict. From 2012 to 2015, we field-tested the efficacy of beehive fences to protect 10 0.4-ha farms next to Tsavo East National Park from elephants. We hung a series of beehives every 10 m around the boundary of each farm plot. The hives were linked with strong wire. After an initial pilot test with 2 farms, the remaining 8 of 10 beehive fences also contained 2-dimensional dummy hives between real beehives to help reduce the cost of the fence. Each trial plot had a neighboring control plot of the same size within the same farm. Of the 131 beehives deployed 88% were occupied at least once during the 3.5-year trial. Two hundred and fifty-three elephants, predominantly 20-45 years old entered the community farming area, typically during the crop-ripening season. Eighty percent of the elephants that approached the trial farms were kept out of the areas protected by the beehive fences, and elephants that broke a fence were in smaller than average groups. Beehive fences not only kept large groups of elephants from invading the farmland plots but the fanners also benefited socially and financially from the sale of 228 kg of elephant-friendly honey. As news of the success of the trial spread, a further 12 farmers requested to join the project, bringing the number of beehive fence protected farms to 22 and beehives to 297. This demonstrates positive adoption of beehive fences as a community mitigation tool. Understanding the response of elephants to the beehive fences, the seasonality of crop raiding and fence breaking, and the willingness of the community to engage with the mitigation method will help contribute to future management strategies for this high human-elephant conflict hotspot and other similar areas in Kenya. El incremento de la fragmentación del hábitat y el crecimiento de la población humana en África han resultado en un aumento del conflicto entre los pequeños agricultores y los elefantes africanos (Loxodonta africana) libres. En el 2012, el Servicio de Vida Silvestre de Kenia (KWS, en inglés) implementó a nivel nacional la Estrategia de Manejo y Conservación para el Elefante en Kenia con duración de 10 años, la cual incluye una acción enfocada en probar si los cercos de panales pueden utilizarse para mitigar el conflicto humano - elefante. De 2012 a 2015, probamos en el campo la eficiencia de los cercos de panales para proteger de los elefantes a diez granjas de 0.4 ha colindantes con el Parque Nacional Tsavo del Este. Colgamos una sere de panales cada 10 m alrededor de los límites de cada lote agrícola. Los panales se conectaron con un alambre fuerte. Después de una prueba piloto inicial en dos granjas, los ocho permanecientes de los diez cercos con panales también incluyeron panales-señuelo bidimensionales entre los panales verdaderos para ayudar a reducir el costo del cerco. Cada lote de prueba tuvo un lote de control vecino del mismo tamaño dentro de la misma granja. De los 131 panales implementados, el 88% fue ocupado por lo menos una vez durante la prueba de 3.5 años. Doscientos cincuenta y tres elefantes, predominantemente entre los 20 - 45 años de edad, entraron a la comunidad agrícola, comúnmente durante la temporada de maduración de las cosechas. El 80 % de los elefantes que se acercaron a las granjas de prueba se mantuvieron fuera de las áreas protegidas por los cercos de panales, y los elefantes que rompieron los cercos estuvieron dentro de grupos más pequeños al promedio. Los cercos de panales no sólo hicieron que grupos grandes de elefantes no invadieran los lotes agrícolas, sino los agricultores también se beneficiaron socialmente con la venta de 228 kg de miel amigable con los elefantes. Conforme se informó sobre el éxito de la prueba piloto, doce agricultores más pidieron unirse al proyecto, lo que llevó al número de granjas protegidas por cercos de panales a 22 y al de los panales a 297. Esto demuestra la adopción positiva de los cercos de panales como una herramienta comunitaria de mitigación. Entender la respuesta de los elefantes a los cercos de panales, la temporalidad de las incursiones hacia las cosechas y de la ruptura de los cercos, y la disponibilidad de la comunidad por participar en el método de mitigación ayudará a contribuir con las siguientes estrategias de manejo para este gran punto caliente del conflicto humano - elefante y en otras áreas similares en Kenia.

The honeybee is the primary managed species worldwide for both crop pollination and honey production. Owing to beekeeping activity, its high relative abundance potentially affects the structure and functioning of pollination networks in natural ecosystems. Given that evidences about beekeeping impacts are restricted to observational studies of specific species and theoretical simulations, we still lack experimental data to test for their larger-scale impacts on biodiversity. Here we used a three-year field experiment in a natural ecosystem to compare the effects of pre- and post-establishment stages of beehives on the pollination network structure and plant reproductive success. Our results show that beekeeping reduces the diversity of wild pollinators and interaction links in the pollination networks. It disrupts their hierarchical structural organization causing the loss of interactions by generalist species, and also impairs pollination services by wild pollinators through reducing the reproductive success of those plant species highly visited by honeybees. High-density beekeeping in natural areas appears to have lasting, more serious negative impacts on biodiversity than was previously assumed.

\"Thomas Seeley has spent his career unraveling the mysteries of honey bee behavior. His goal has been to understand how the 30,000 or so bees in a colony work together as a unit to accomplish such things as finding and occupying a snug nest cavity, furnishing it with beeswax combs, filling these combs with brood and food, and keeping themselves well nourished, comfortably warm, and safe from intruders. In this book, Seeley's goal is to illuminate these and other mysteries about the workings of honey bee colonies and explore how those mysteries were solved. Seeley's aim, as he says, is to review how and what he and his colleagues have learned about honey bees and to share some things that are not in the scientific papers: the personal experiences that drew him to these studies, the little observations that led to important insights, and the feelings of delight that came with solving each mystery. The book's thirty chapters are roughly chronological, offering a meta-history of the field alongside explication of various studies. Each chapter is structured approximately the same way: first, Seeley describes how he and his colleagues discovered a specific mystery about how a colony works, then how they solved it, and finally each closes with an explanation of the implications of the mystery and the way it fits into the wider field of honey bee research. Intimate and informative, PIPING HOT BEES AND BOISTEROUS BUZZ-RUNNERS will weave together personal narrative with the results of over 50 years of research into honey bees and honey bee colonies. It will offer context for more current research and introduce readers to the deep workings of honey bee behavior\"-- Provided by publisher.

Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things are playing an increasingly important role in monitoring beehives. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic recognition of honeybee type by analyzing the sound generated by worker bees and drone bees during their flight close to an entrance to a beehive. We conducted a wide comparative study to determine the most effective preprocessing of audio signals for the detection problem. We compared the results for several different methods for signal representation in the frequency domain, including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), gammatone cepstral coefficients (GTCCs), the multiple signal classification method (MUSIC) and parametric estimation of power spectral density (PSD) by the Burg algorithm. The coefficients serve as inputs for an autoencoder neural network to discriminate drone bees from worker bees. The classification is based on the reconstruction error of the signal representations produced by the autoencoder. We propose a novel approach to class separation by the autoencoder neural network with various thresholds between decision areas, including the maximum likelihood threshold for the reconstruction error. By classifying real-life signals, we demonstrated that it is possible to differentiate drone bees and worker bees based solely on audio signals. The attained level of detection accuracy enables the creation of an efficient automatic system for beekeepers.

A visit to Leo's grandfather's farm turns upside down when his grandmother's bee hives are stolen. A light-hearted and funny middle-grade novel for fans of Rebecca Stead and Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Eleven-year-old Leo is an \"armchair adventurer.\" This, according to Dad, means he'd choose adventures in books or video games over real-life experiences. And while Leo hates the label, he can't argue with it. Unlike his little sister Lizzie, Leo is not a risk-taker. So when he, Lizzie, Mom and Dad leave the city to visit Grandpa on Heron Island, Leo finds all kinds of dangers to avoid - from the deep, dark ocean to an old barn on the verge of collapse. But nothing on the island is more fearsome than Grandpa himself - Leo has never met anyone so grumpy! According to Mom, Grandpa is still grieving the recent death of his wife, a beekeeper beloved by everyone on the island. Despite Leo's best efforts to avoid it, adventure finds him anyway when Grandma's beehives go missing in the dead of night. Infuriated, Grandpa vows to track down the sticky-fingered thieves himself . . . with risk-averse Leo and danger-loving Lizzie (plus a kitten named Mayhem) in tow.

Beekeeping in Africa has been practiced for many years through successive generations and along inherited patterns. Beekeepers continue to face challenges in accessing consistent and business-driven markets for their bee products. In addition, the honeybee populations are decreasing due to colony collapse disorder (CCD), fire, loss of bees in swarming, honey buggers and other animals, moths, starvation, cold weather, and Varoa mites. The main issues are related to un-controlled temperature, humidity, and traditional management of beekeeping. These challenges result in low production of honey and colony losses. The control of the environmental conditions within and surrounding the beehives are not available to beekeepers due to the lack of monitoring systems. A Smart Beehive System using Internet of Things (IoT) technology would allow beekeepers to keep track of the amount of honey created in their hives and bee colonies even when they are far from their hives, through mobile phones, which would curtail the challenges currently faced by the beekeepers. However, there are challenges in the design of energy-efficient embedded electronic devices for IoT. A promising solution is to provide energy autonomy to the IoT nodes that will harvest residual energy from ambient sources, such as motion, vibrations, light, or heat. This paper proposes a Self-Powered Smart Beehive Monitoring and Control System (SBMaCS) using IoT to support remote follow-up and control, enhancing bee colonies’ security and thus increasing the honey productivity. First, we develop the SBMaCS hardware prototype interconnecting various sensors, such as temperature sensor, humidity sensor, piezoelectric transducer—which will work as a weight sensor—motion sensor, and flame sensor. Second, we introduce energy harvesting models to self-power the SBMaCS by analyzing the (i) energy harvested from adult bees’ vibrations, (ii) energy harvesting through the piezoelectric transducer, and (iii) radio frequency energy harvesting. Third, we develop a mobile phone application that interacts with the SBMaCS hardware to monitor and control the various parameters related to the beehives. Finally, the SBMaCS PCB layout is also designed. SBMaCS will help beekeepers to successfully monitor and control some important smart beekeeping activities wherever they are using their mobile phone application.