Detection of Deviations in Beehives Based on Sound Analysis and Machine Learning

Sammanfattning: Honeybees are an essential part of our ecosystem as they take care of most of the pollination in the world. They also produce honey, which is the main reason beekeeping was introduced in the first place. As the production of honey is affected by the living conditions of the honeybees, the beekeepers aim to maintain the health of the honeybee societies. TietoEVRY, together with HSB Living Lab, introduced connected beehives in a project named BeeLab. The goal of BeeLab is to provide a service to monitor and gain knowledge about honeybees using the data collected with different sensors. Today they measure weight, temperature, air pressure, and humidity. It is known that honeybees produce different sounds when different events are occurring in the beehive. Therefore BeeLab wants to introduce sound monitoring to their service. This project aims to investigate the possibility of detecting deviations in beehives based on sound analysis and machine learning. This includes recording sound from beehives followed by preprocessing of sound data, feature extraction, and applying a machine learning algorithm on the sound data. An experiment is done using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) to extract sound features and applying the DBSCAN machine learning algorithm to investigate the possibilities of detecting deviations in the sound data. The experiment showed promising results as deviating sounds used in the experiment were grouped into different clusters.