FEATURES OF SPRING CONTROL OF BEES USING APIVOX SMART MONITOR APP

When practice beekeepers began to use the first version of the Apivox series device, then during early spring control, Hungarian beekeepers experienced a significant misunderstanding of the diagnostics shown by the device. In early spring, it showed that in the family there are possible problems with the queen. The check usually showed that everything was not so bad.

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In order to understand why this happened, we need to delve a little into the history of the issue. The fact is that, initially, in the basis of the algorithms of the device's functioning the ideas of Woods and Eskov were placed. In particular, according to Woods, the signal of "singing the hive" spoke about possible problems with the queen, up to its loss, and also appeared before swarming. And exactly in this way we tried to use it. The appearance of this signal in early spring was a surprise for us.

In 2017, on the basis of the works conducted by European scientists, we realized what in reality the signal of "singing the hive" means. This signal was not connected with the queen by itself, but with the result of her work - with the open brood. All the arguments and evidence of this phenomenon can be found in our new book. Thus, it turned out that the appearance of a powerful signal of "singing the hive", or as we called it "brood care", occurs when there is a relatively large amount of open brood in the family. And this is especially noticeable against the background of the lack of honey collection.

So, now, the new version of our device - Apivox Smart Monitor - takes this circumstance into account. When such a signal appears, exceeding the general background of the hive, the device will issue a diagnosis about the presence in the family of a relatively large amount of open brood. In order to control the process of brood care in springtime, a new mode was created - "Brood Control" - which, in the form of a graph, will show the distribution of in-hive works over time.

The graph makes it possible to understand whether there is a lot of brood in the family, whether there are enough bees to care for it, and whether its quantity allows the bees to work normally. Testing the device in this mode during the 2018 season suggests that the mode is fully operational and useful. The results of the observations were unambiguously confirmed by the personal control of the experimental families.

Keywords

beekeeping, apicultura, apicoltura, apiculture, bee

Countries

Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, United States