Introduction

Our Bumblebee nesting project started in 2011 as a bit of conservation to help the declining bumblebee population by encouraging one (or more) to nest in boxes in our garden. We discovered it's not easy, and our project quickly evolved into an ongoing and intimate study of these amazing creatures, which we are sharing here for the benefit of all.

Amongst our unexpected successes are:

A short clip in the film "Britain in a Day" by Ridley Scott (Broadcast by the BBC in 2012)

Featured in Wired Magazine for creating the World's first tweeting bumblebees

Winner of the Internet of Things award 2012 - Environmental Category

Oldest recorded age we can find of a worker Bufftailed Bumblebee - at 103 days

We've discovered, observed and collected a sizeable amount of real-world data, still being analysed and written up (Overview here). Additionally,

We've sourced several live colonies from commercial providers and have been looking after numerous disabled bees indoors.

We've learnt to recognise individual bees, spot specific/individual behaviour patterns

We measured efficiency and can predict some of their behaviour triggers.

We have some CCTV cameras pointing at the nestboxes and inside!

You can also follow BeeBoxALula on twitter where our bumblebees tweet live for themselves!

Insights

We're also using tech to monitor the lives of our bumblebees - visual, audio, temperature, sunlight, weather. We can see how the environment impacts their behaviour and understand, capture and share the marvels of their secret lives.

As a species under great threat, we've brought the critical study of Bumblebees into the Multimedia age and revealed intriguing and new insights based on direct observation.

In the first instance I have chosen to use Skype to get a webcam up and running at the beebox, with the ability to access it remotely over the internet.

Initially I simply chose this technology solution because it meant nothing new to install, since I already had skype and already had it working with my existing USB webcamera(s). I'm using a Samsung NC20 netbook at the moment as the camera host, and it doesn't have a lot of grunt, so I stuck with what I knew worked.

It turns out there are some pros and cons of the Skype solution, which I thought might be useful to list here.

Pros

It's free and lots of people have it. (And in my case, I didn't have to install anything else).
You can pre-configure Skype to use a particular webcam (if you have multiple webcams connected) and also configure it to auto-answer calls with video. This is, of course, essential if you are going to access it remotely over the internet! So, you just call in remotely, and it answers with the webcam.
You can limit access to only those on your contact list - this provides a simple method of access control and allows you to control privacy
Since the video stream is provided "on demand", it is not active and broadcasting all the time. Therefore it is not consuming any of your broadband bandwidth allowance whilst no-one is viewing the camera.
Although you can't choose which camera to view remotely, you can configure skype locally with different cameras, so you can set it up to show different views. We have an indoor and an outdoor camera at the moment.
There's quite a nice, free iPhone app for Skype which you can use to view the camera.

Cons

Some of the strengths of Skype are also weaknesses, depending on how you want to use it.

So, for example, only being able to accept one call at a time. This means it is not really a broadcast system. If our project was to get popular (it'd be nice to think it had educational value) then this might ultimately rule out skype as we will need more than one person at a time to be able to view the camera.
It is not easy to record the video - this isn't built into Skype natively. Although Skype supports plugins, most of them are audio only - I didn't find a useful video recorder plugin.
There is no motion detection capability.

However, as system to get up and running, to test camera positions and lighting, and to let a few select people have access, it has proved more than adequate and I'll continue running with it until/unless demand dictates an alternative solution.

Nik Sargent

Nik Sargent

Bumblebee Project Home / Blog

Nik Sargent

Introduction

Insights

Blog:

Pro & Cons of Skype for Public Webcam

Pros

Cons

Nik Sargent