Electronic sensing and identification of queen bees in honeybee colonies

This paper discusses the acoustic sound recording arrangements made for sensing and identification of swarming bees and queen bees in honey bee colonies. The distinct characteristics of sounds made by the queen bees are introduced and compared with those emanated by worker bees. A comprehensive frequency analyses are given. It is shown that queen bees emanate sounds at relatively high frequencies. An attempt was made control the behaviour of queen bees by computer generated simulated sounds. The playback and artificially generated sounds were observed to have some effect on the bee behaviour. This study was conducted to remove bees from the hive and for the rapid identification of the queen.