A new approach for the simultaneous tracking of multiple honeybees for analysis of hive behavior

Social activities are among the most striking of animal behaviors, and the clarification of their mechanisms is a major subject in ethology. Honeybees are a good model for revealing these mechanisms because they display various social behaviors, such as division of labor, in their colonies. Image processing is a precise and convenient tool for obtaining animal behavior data, but even recent methods are inadequate for the identification or description of honeybee behavior. This is because of the difficulty distinguishing between the large number of individuals in a small hive and their multiple movements. The present study developed a new computer-aided system, using a vector quantization method, for the identification and behavioral tracking of individual honeybees. The vector quantization method enabled separation of honeybee bodies in photographs recorded as a movie. This system succeeded in analyzing a huge number of frames quickly and can thus save both time and labor. Moreover, the system identified more than 72% of the bees in a hive and found and determined the active areas in the hive by extracting the trajectories of walking bees. In addition, useful behavioral data on the honeybee waggle dance were obtained using the present system.

[1]  Jürgen Tautz,et al.  Honeybees establish specific sites on the comb for their waggle dances , 1997, Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

[2]  H. Aonuma,et al.  The dance of the honeybee: how do honeybees dance to transfer food information effectively? , 2008, Acta biologica Hungarica.

[3]  W. Kirchner,et al.  Honeybee dance communication , 1988, Naturwissenschaften.

[4]  Jürgen Tautz,et al.  The Buzz about Bees , 2008 .

[5]  L. Rabiner,et al.  The acoustics, speech, and signal processing society - A historical perspective , 1984, IEEE ASSP Magazine.

[6]  J. Tautz,et al.  The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism , 2008 .

[7]  Randolf Menzel,et al.  Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees , 2008, Journal of Experimental Biology.

[8]  Bin Li,et al.  A novel approach to extract colon lumen from CT images for virtual colonoscopy , 2000, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[9]  T. Seeley.  Honey bee foragers as sensory units of their colonies , 2004, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[10]  N. Papanikolopoulos,et al.  Vision-Based Human Tracking and Activity Recognition , 2003 .

[11]  Tucker Balch,et al.  Automatic Identification of Bee Movement , 2003 .

[12]  F. Dyer.  The biology of the dance language. , 2002, Annual review of entomology.

[13]  I. Abramson,et al.  MULTIPLE SEARCH FLIGHTS OF THE DANCER'S FOLLOWERS: RESULT OF INFORMATION OR ENERGY DEFICIENCY , 2004 .

[14]  T. Seeley.  The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies , 1995 .

[15]  W. Tuckwell,et al.  The Honey Bee , 1891, Nature.

[16]  R. Gray,et al.  Vector quantization , 1984, IEEE ASSP Magazine.

[17]  Tautz.  Honeybee waggle dance: recruitment success depends on the dance floor , 1996, The Journal of experimental biology.

[18]  T. Seeley,et al.  Assessing the benefits of cooperation in honeybee foraging: search costs, forage quality, and competitive ability , 1988, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[19]  Hai Tao,et al.  Object Tracking using Color Correlogram , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Workshop on Visual Surveillance and Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance.

[20]  Shaowu Zhang,et al.  Honeybee dances communicate distances measured by optic flow , 2001, Nature.

[21]  Robert M. Gray,et al.  An Algorithm for Vector Quantizer Design , 1980, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[22]  T. Judd.  The waggle dance of the honey bee: Which bees following a dancer successfully acquire the information? , 1994, Journal of Insect Behavior.

[23]  William F. Towne,et al.  The spatial precision of the honey bees' dance communication , 1988, Journal of Insect Behavior.

[24]  Thomas D. Seeley,et al.  Tactics of dance choice in honey bees: do foragers compare dances? , 1992, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[25]  T. Seeley,et al.  FORAGING STRATEGY OF HONEYBEE COLONIES IN A TEMPERATE DECIDUOUS FOREST , 1982 .

[26]  Frank Dellaert,et al.  Efficient particle filter-based tracking of multiple interacting targets using an MRF-based motion model , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[27]  Michael R. Gossop.  An Introduction to Animal Behaviour, Second Edition, Aubrey Manning. Arnold, London (1972), Price £3·80 , 1976 .

[28]  Allen Gersho,et al.  Vector quantization and signal compression , 1991, The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science.

[29]  M. Beekman,et al.  Increase in dance imprecision with decreasing foraging distance in the honey bee Apis mellifera L. is partly explained by physical constraints , 2005, Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

[30]  Thomas D. Seeley,et al.  Imprecision in waggle dances of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) for nearby food sources: error or adaptation? , 1999, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[31]  R. Morse.  The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees , 1994 .

[32]  Hitoshi Aonuma,et al.  Biological Insights Into Robotics: Honeybee Foraging Behavior by a Waggle Dance , 2008, Adv. Robotics.

[33]  Frank Dellaert,et al.  A Rao-Blackwellized particle filter for EigenTracking , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2004. CVPR 2004..

[34]  Manuela M. Veloso,et al.  Automatically tracking and analyzing the behavior of live insect colonies , 2001, AGENTS '01.

[35]  Biswajit Bose,et al.  Multi-class object tracking algorithm that handles fragmentation and grouping , 2007, 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.