Accessing the On-Line Observation Hive

The world's first electronic observation hive has started its third year! You can watch the bees coming and going through the entrance tube via our beecam. It takes a picture 15 times per second and streams it to the web. On a fast connection, the bees will appear to race past. On a telephone modem, you may only see 1 picture every 5-6 seconds. Be sure to check out the beecam mounted above a hive entrance in Texas.

Remember, we are on Mountain Standard Time (MST), 6 hours behind the world's Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) clock. In mid-summer, our bees fly from about 9 or 10 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night. After a warm night, the bees may begin to fly as soon as 6:00 a.m. The beecam in Texas is on Central Standard Time, 1 hour different from Montana. Note that the mid-summer daylength in Texas is several hours shorter than that of Montana.

When you link to Beekeeper Cam, if you get a black picture, it is probably nighttime in Montana or Texas. If the image is blank, no bees were under the lens when the picture was taken. We get lots of e-mails from people in different time zones who tell us that our cameras aren't working - they forget about the time shifts and that bees don't fly in wet or cold weather.

The Hive

The on-line observation hive is brought to you by The University of Montana-Missoula and the Montana Beekeepers Association. The hive serves as a test bed for emerging biological data acquistion and communication technologies.

Our observation hive is a 5-frame unit. The hive is 52 inches tall (132 cm) x 30.5 inches (77.5 cm) at the base. It is made of cherry and maple, with Lexan (unbreakable) sides, and black plastic covers that help reduce heat loss. The Lexan panels are spaced 1.81 inch (4.6 cm) apart. The hive rests on a ball-bearing ring, so that it can be turned around for easy viewing. The bottom-mounted exit tube also has a swivel bearing. The black box mounted against the window contains a bee flight counter. The hive sits in a first floor office of the Health Science Building on The University of Montana campus.

Bee Flight

You can view a graph of each day's Flight Activity. When you click on this link, you will see a two-column table. The current day's flight activity should be the last entry in the table. You can download this information either as an ASCII text file (left column) or as a self-graphing JAVA chart (right column). The text-based data files can be imported into your own spreadsheet or database. To see the JAVA produced charts, you will need a 32-bit computer and a recent version of a Netscape or Explorer browser. When the graph appears on your computer, clicking on the colored label boxes toggles on or off the individual chart lines for incoming (In) bees or outgoing (Out) bees.

Each chart's horizontal (X) axis displays the time from 6:00 a.m. through 10:00 p.m. MST. The graphed data is updated every 5 minutes. The vertical (Y) axis displays the number of bees that have gone In or Out of the observation hive, summed over 5 minute intervals. At the end of each day, the ASCII text file and the JAVA chart for that day are added at the end of the list of archived data sets.

Weather Conditions

You can check on weather conditions by clicking on WeatherMax. The weather station is on top of our 5-story Health Science Building. Current weather conditions can be displayed on a plain table or viewed on an array of JAVA gauges. A summary of each day's weather is posted to the Weather Data Archives. As with the flight activity, you can download either a text file or a JAVA graph for each day. Again, the current day appears at the bottom of the table.

When downloaded, the JAVA graphs display all of the weather variables simultaneously. Thus, barometric pressure appears as a nearly straight horizontal line at the top of the chart; while indoor temperature is a straight line near the bottom of the chart. You need to re-scale. Click on the boxes in the upper right-hand portion of the display to turn on or off individual chart lines. Alternatively, you can click on an Alt Y box to set up a second Y axis. We suggest that you turn on the Alt Y for barometric pressure. That forces the chart to plot pressure against a Y axis that suddenly appears on the right side of the plot.