Acoustically Tracking the Comings and Goings of Bumblebees

This paper describes recent progress in acoustic monitoring of bumblebees. Prior work has addressed detection of naturally foraging bees using flight buzzes without further characterization of the type of buzz present. In this work, we demonstrate the ability to discern between "arrival" and "departure" buzzes of bees entering or leaving a nest. Timing of departures and returns to the nest informs resource abundance as well as environmental limitations on foraging activity. Our method achieves 96.2% accuracy in classifying arrivals versus departures for visually-confirmed buzzes. We propose a model for acoustically monitoring the behavior of bumblebees and outline steps for future work.