Dears,
together with my colleagues we are trying to collect information about suitable methods and budget needs to collect highly detailed data to assess the health status of a honeybee colony (mortality, structure etc).
Therefore, I kindly ask you information about costs of the following equipment:
-hive + bee swarm (for colonies)
-hive scale (to assess colony weight and honey production)
-video camera and RFID (to assess foragers activity)
-camera to take pictures of combs (to assess numbers of brood/in-hive bees)
-available software you may know for digital image analysis
Thank you very much for your contribution.
Kind regards,
Giorgio Sperandio
In our region around 200-300 US$ per hive.other items depend on their specifications
Hello Dear
The costs and returns of beekeeping is attach table. please see it. Best regards
The cost of equipment is highly dependent on what brand you use, and the source. So my price from Fisher Scientific with a US university discount will have little relevance to what you could get the same for through the preferred vendor at your institution. It also depends on the route you want to take. Is there a commercial vendor for RFID equipment for honeybees, or do you collaborate with an electrical engineer to make this in-house?
Observer is one software for image analysis of insect behavior (http://www.noldus.com/human-behavior-research/products/the-observer-xt).
For image analysis there are things like Image Pro Plus (http://www.mediacy.com/imageproplus).
These are fairly expensive options, but pricing and availability may vary.
You will want an observation hive. Placing a camera in with the bees will probably result in short camera life. You can buy a standard hive and rebuild it, or may be able to buy one already made.
You may not need the most expensive equipment available. However, in a grant proposal I would shoot for mid-range or better. If you under-budget and later find that a 5 Megapixel camera cannot provide sufficient resolution, then you are in real trouble. The other consideration is that the better the images the easier it will be to process them. So it might take 90 minutes to process 30 minutes of video if that video is at 5 Megapixels, but it will take only 5 minutes if the video is at 15 Megapixels. The reason is that the image analysis software makes fewer mistakes at the higher resolution.
Best of luck.
Thank you very much for your prompt replies.
I think I have a good overview regarding costs and possible software to analyze images.
Very much appreciated!
Cheers,
Giorgio
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Ecology