Colony Collapse Monitoring

This project was a response to studies in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a term first applied to the drastic number of disappearances of commercial honey-bee colonies from late 2006 on. The causes are not fully understood and are attributed to a wide range of causes that range from biotic factors such as mites and insect pathogens, environmental change-related stress, pesticides, and large-scale commercial beekeeping, to genetically modified crops with pest control characteristics and the disproportionate amount of wheat and corn now grown and pollinated by the wind. It has been suggested that due to a combination of many of these factors there may be no single cause. In this body of research, bee colonies were observed by placing contact microphones inside a series of hives to monitor the health of each individual hive and determine the health of the colony overall, as this can be determined by sonic changes in hives.