Anyway, finally this weekend I at least got chance to do a quick traverse along my favourite transect and see what bumbling was happening out there in the wild. 

Not much - is the answer - but not nothing either. I've been a little baffled that there are so few bumblebees about in general; really not seeing much of any shape and size, though the flowers have been late coming, many only starting to bloom now (our lavender and "love in the mist" finally broke out this week). 

I did see, however, quite a few queens; mainly redtails (4 or 5) but also 2 bufftails. One was cruising along the ditch at a height of about 1.5 metres just minding her own business. Another was burrowing into moss (see video). She wasn't the only one showing nest-searching behaviour - most of the redtails were too seemingly "nest searching too". Here's a video of the "moss-burrowing" - I welcome explanations, since there is no obvious nest hole they are clearing out!

This all seems a bit odd - by the start of May last year pretty much all the Queens were safely alreadu building their nests - but of course the weather has been atrocious and it seems this may have delayed the successful search and establishment of nests. The other compounding factor is what may have happened with "early queens". Our own colony produced about 20 new queens in April - which have all left the nest - so what are they up to now? Perhaps they are just biding their time outdoors, waiting to mate when males appear.  (I still need to review the CCTV and figure out when they actually started leaving the nest permanently). 

I also saw an unusual bumblebee - black with whitish stripes - almost getting into a fight with some other identified buzzing animal. I think it may have been a cuckoo bee of some sort (e.g. Barbut's). I'll post the video later. 

So we put one in her box.

And she knew exactly what to do. First time. 

I love this video. It's the embodiment of the wonder of nature, and instinct developed through millions of years of learning and evolution. 

Dusty is quite an old lady already - at the time of writing she's already at least 38 days old! Good on ya girl!

Wired were really intrigued to understand the motivation of the project and how the tech made it possible for our bumblebees to generate tweets based on their activity. We had to explain the lifecycle of bumblebees and the challenges they face and why climate is affecting them. 

I spent half an hour or so talking to Olivia, associate editor, and answered a few email questions and she did a wonderful job of writing the story and included my pictures too - so, to say I was thrilled is an understatement. 

Thankfully I didn't suffer a "Stephen Fry" on my site - i.e. a total deluge that takes it out - but there has been plenty of interest in the story. We got a retweet too from Martha Kearney (radio 4 presenter and avid honey bee keeper) which generated some more traffic. Most of the reaction has been "awesome" or "what a cool idea!" - obviously I would agree! The reaction has been really positive and encouraging. The good news really is that it helps to further raise awareness of bumblebees and their plight and that can only be a good thing.

Under the covers

Key to the whole story is what goes on "under the covers" to monitor the activity of our bumblebees. My current implementation is nothing better than a prototype or "proof of concept", but I'm delighted that Zettlex (a company in Cambridge, specialising in high tech sensors) have really taken up the challenge of helping me create a "next-generation" wax-moth flap system that can track the entrance and exit activity from the nest very accurately. I really can't thank those guys enough and I can't wait to go live and take our data capture and monitoring to the next level. I must also mention Dragonfli, providers of the colony and lodge, who have also donated some "wax moth kit" components to help make it all happen.

There's something wonderful about the way these smaller companies are able and willing to help, and tackle new challenges - it's very inspiring and I'm very grateful to them. 

To give an insight into the type of data we'll be collecting, our bumbles were very co-operative today and fairly busy. The data from my current system is show below:

This is very, very basic data, as you can see - and making sense of it to draw insight is a challenge I still have. For the meantime, we generate some simple tweets which gives visibility of what information is being generated. 

However, the Zettlex system is way surperior, and the sensor itself offers the ability to do things like measure and time the inputs (e.g. the amount the flap is moved) to create different triggers. It could, therefore, in principle detect the difference between workers and queens using the flap. Or detect the difference between entrance and exit by the way the flap is pushed and extended. There's a whole ream of possibilities, most of which we haven't though of yet. I'm very excited - gotta run before we walk though. ☺

It's still early days, but I think it's fair to say this part of our project has captured the imagination and has the potential to reveal some fascinating insights into just how busy our busy bees are. 

I took the opportunity to check the nearby field to see what queens were out and about (if any) and see if i could find any wild nests. I didn't find any nests, but I saw plenty of queens and shot some great video of a vestal cuckoo (bombus vestalis) searching for nests to invade. (see later). 

First up though, quick survey of queens seen in a 1 hour traverse along my favourite transect:

nearly all these were resting, a few flying past, and only the Cuckoos nest searching, looking for an unsuspecting established nest to take over:

One of the bufftails was more restless than most and she had no pollen - this would typically mean she hadn't set up nest (once she has, she will collect pollen to feed herself and her brood, and then ultimately not leave the nest at all). I decided to capture her and introduce her to our garden and pilkington box. Since we would not trap her in for more than a few minutes, it wouldn't matter if she had her own nest to go back to; and it could mean she would choose our box to nest in. As it happened, she took a while to enter the box and left not long later. Which is cool - if she liked the location she'll be back and if not, she's only 200 yards from where she was found and can easily get back. 

All Black

We also checked out the gardens in town and saw a few bumblebees there - another vestal cuckoo was foraging. But most interesting was spotting 3 seperate all black bumblebees forgaing and collecing pollen. I've not got a proper ID on these yet, but there are forms of all black Garden bumblebees, especially in the south/east of England (where we are). Here's a video:

New outlook

new CCTV camera looking at front of lodge..

Sugru is my new magic ingredient which can be moulded and stuck to almost anything and solidifies over the course of 24hrs into tough, waterproof silcone. So, here's hoping it does the job. 
And just for fun, a few other pictures:

rushing to get home... And a new box layout for our indoor bumblebees:

new box layout (with an attempt at some containment) for our indoor bees(We made some fake "wax" pots for our bumbles, to see what they do with them).

Our bumblebees' first ever tweet

To my knowledge, this is the first tweet ever generated by bumblebees themselves. Sadly they are not equipped with a bee-size keyboard, so instead the tweet comes courtesy of an activity monitor via the entrance flap to their nest. The flap itself is there for protection against invasion by Wax Moth and the bumblebees have learnt to operate it in order to leave the nest to forage. 

The Bumblbees are busy and have started tweeting

While the tweeting is fun, there is a serious point to having an "internet enabled" bumblebee nest, as we are collecting data about the environment/micro-climate and the bumblebee activity "outside of the laboratory". Though bumblebees have been studied for well over 100 years, some of this research takes place in the lab; a criticism that is often levelled, for example, on studies of the effect of pesticides on pollinators.

Our project, therefore, is demonstrating a proof of concept for the type of technology that can be used to study bumblebee behaviour in wild environments. We hope to build on the data we collected in 2011 which was able to determine the factors that trigger bumblebees to start and stop working at the beginning and end of the day.

[For more details: technology blog entries and technology setup]

screenshot of live data monitoring from our bumblebee nest

The system has been up and running for a week, measuring temperature and light levels, but I needed to tackle two things:

1. The outdoor temperature sensor was too exposed and over-reading in direct sunlight; and was too close to the garage wall, so also picking up heat from the wall
2. I still had to finish constructing and fit a flap sensor to monitor activity in and out of the nest

For the thermometer, I hacked a small bottle apart and fixed it up with my new favourite "stuff for making things with": Sugru. Here is is below with the iobridge board in the background. 

a bottle to hold the outdoor thermometerNext I just spray painted it with some plastic paint - so it would blend in a bit and be protected from sunlight. Only a rough job - good enough!

bottle spray painted & fixed together with SugruThe thermometer (white wire) runs up a small tube in the neck of the bottle where it is shieled from the elements. Then it is simply mounted on a cane round about nest height, and away from the garage wall.  

thermometer on a stick!In comparison with our wireless weather system, my DIY thermometer was only reading 0.2C difference, which I am very happy with. 

Flap Counter

Next up was the flap sensor. Getting a good flap sensor running has been critical for me this year, because I want to use it to closely correlate activity data with enivronment data. I was only able to do this last year in a minimal way because it's so labour intensive (to do from CCTV).

While this initial system will not give me the reliability required to accurately count bees in and out (it's not directional anyway) what it should do is give me activity levels throughout the day (e.g. first, last, flights during bad weather etc.) which will definitely be a step forward. 

The system is comprised, essentially, of an alumiumium foil strip attached to the side of the flap that acts as a make/break switch on the ioBridge digital input. When the flap is closed, the circuit is made, and the digital input is held low. Once a bee pushes through the flap, the circuit is broken, which generates a digital pulse that the ioBridge board can count. 

flap sensorIt's taken quite a bit of experimenation to get the inputs working in a way that is meaningful. Opening and closing the flap doesn't just generate a single pulse but can generate many (the bumblebees themselves very rarely just open it cleanly - but push against, causing it to open and close); so I can't rely on this basic circuit to count single open/close of the flap. 

But it doesn't really matter as the system will count the total number of activations and report this every 10 minutes. These 10 minutes slices will give an indication of the overall activity level, and in particular detect things like 1st & last exits, which I'm particularly interested in. 

This is only a phase 1 system - to get me started and get some data collected; I have ideas/plans for two further developments of this system - one using a light beam sensor (this would solve the problem of the flap being so busy that it actually gets held open and only counts a single pulse for many bees) and also a non-contact displacement sensor which will measure the exact angle of opening. Ideally a combination of these two would be good - but I don't have enough inputs at the moment. 

So, I have to wait for a few days now to collect some data and see how the system performs. 

She's got a problem with her wings; in fact, they seem as though they haven't inflated properly and become large and rigid enough, and consequently she can't generate the lift needed no matter how hard she flaps. We're still not 100% sure, we keep expecting her to take off at some point, but we've tried allowing her to do so numerous times and it just doesn't happen. 

Consequently we've kept her indoors and fed her. She has fed fine on honey water and loves the Kapok we provided - burrowing deep down with ease, often disappearing from sight altogether!

Where's she gone? :)Up till now we have kept our two worker bumbles and the queen separate as we weren't really sure how it would work out putting them together, or indeed what we should do with the queen long term. We've sought additional expert advice, and the best suggestion is that the kindest thing to do is actually keep our queen alive (she will perish outdoors) and take the opportunity to study her behaviour.

a clearer view of our queen's imperfect wingsIn fact, her behaviour has been a mild source of concern as she has basically spent a good deal of her time buried in the Kapok, very still. Not that there is a lot to do, of course, but it's kind of worrying to see her so inactive. So, we took a calculated decision to introduce the workers to the same space as her to see whether as a small community it would have a beneficial effect.

We ensured that we had a backout plan and introduced them together late this afternoon. Well, the good news is there was no fighting! 

Actually the behaviour has been rather intriguing as we watch for subtle cues of their interaction.

The first reponse seemed to be that our two workers were interested in the queen and kept going over to her to explore. She was a bit annoyed by this - and has given then warning signs, as well as nudged them out of the way, and the occasional kick. Lucky, the smallest, was most interested. In general the Queen was ignoring them except when they came to her. 

That broad pattern has continued, however, at times the queen has now pro-actively followed the workers. She shows signs of exerting her dominance by nudging them, possibly biting at them a little (legs/side) - though that's hard to tell. But what is obvious, is she stands right over them and engulfs them with her whole body (see video). She does not appear to harm them in any way, but it's a real apparent show of dominance/submission and quite intriguing. 

Even more remarkable, however, is the behaviour of the workers, because every so often - lucky in particularly - approaches the queen and actually walks right under her, assuming the same position as described above. So, this appears like a deliberate show of submission to the Queen, which I certainly never expected.

All throughout this there is a certain sense that the queen is a bit agitated by the attention. We have to remember, of course, that these bumbles are sisters, not mother daughter, and I wouldn't doubt for a minutes that they could tell the difference in smell. Perhaps our queen has to work up to producing the pheremones that her mother would normally produce to help control her offspring; and we know that behavioural dominance is a key part of the dynamic in the ordinary nest. (see my reference papers). Of course, there are mechanisms, such as smell for cuckoo bumblebees to take over the dominant role in the nest, so we know it can happen - and perhaps we are seeing some of that here. 

The other thing that has become immediately noticeable, though we will have to observe for a few days to determine if it is coincidence, is that the workers - Nedine in particular have suddenly shown an interest in the pollen that they have never done so before. Both the workers have spent more time amongst the pollen that is in the corner of the box, seemingly just walking through - but tonight we clearly observed Nedine's mandibles in action, picking at small grains. Has the presence of a queen suddenly triggered an interest in pollen? If so, the effect was within a matter of hours. 

So, we wait a little nervously for this first night, hoping all will be intact in the morning - remembering back to when we introduced our workers and boy last year and he created chaos in the nest!

Getting Sensitive

First of all I was contacted back by Zettlex - a small company in Cambridge who make "non contact" distance sensors. Their systems are very small and light, based on magnetic resonance, and can very accurately measure the distance between the sensor and an 'antenna' device attached to a moving object.

Now, before you go thinking I'm sticking sensors to bumblebees, I'm not! (That's next year's idea!) ☺ 

The plan, actually is to mount a sensor on the wax moth trap door, so that when it is in use (see below), the movement can be detected. 

bumblebee using the wax moth flapI wasn't sure if Zettlex would have been able to supply such a small, single unit, but they have very kindly offered to help me out - so the least I can do is sing their praises! 

Of course, there will be a lot of work still to get the sensor working, hopefully integrated with the iobridge platform so I can get realtime data and alerts out to the internet and beyond. I'm actually really excited about the possibilities, because over and above tracking simple activity data, such as start and end times of the day, I may be able to get data about how the flap is actually used: for example, how long it takes a bumblebee to master its usage. 

Hitting the screen

Even more exciting news came this afternoon with confirmation that some of our footage has made it into the final "Britain in a Day" film. I'm mentioning it here, because although we submitted several hours worth of material we know that the piece that has been selected concerns our bumblebees. It's actually a lovely segment, filled with emotion and despite its short length, a strong storyline and message; which is probably why it succeeded in being picked.

I don't want to give away too much, so that's all I say; but if you are in the UK, the film should be showing on BBC2 on June 2nd 2012. 

Here's some information about the whole "Britain in a day" project:

Britain In A Day is a major new project designed to capture a unique snapshot of Britain on one day, and people from all corners of the United Kingdom are invited to take part.

On Saturday November 12th we asked people in Britain to film something that captures the intimacy and singularity of their life and to upload it to a dedicated channel on YouTube. With the support of executive producers Ridley Scott and Academy Award winning Kevin Macdonald, director Morgan Matthews will use the rich trove of material submitted to craft a feature-length documentary film that captures the variety and vibrancy of life in Britain today. 

The result will be broadcast on BBC2 next year in the run up to the Olympics.

The idea is based on Life In A Day, the global, user-generated feature film produced by Ridley Scott’s company Scott Free London and directed by Kevin Macdonald. 80,000 videos were submitted to YouTube by people all over the world, wherever they were and whatever they were doing. The result was a powerful and inspiring portrait of the world on a single day. 

We feel privileged to have been selected and are really looking forward to seeing the whole film. If it turns out anything like "Life in a Day" (the original global version) it will be brilliant!

I asked BCW if she would go out and try and rescue her but by then it was a little too late, and she couldn't be found. 

However, in the process, BCW heard a buzzing nearby and when she looked found a queen bee on the gravel and grass near one of our other nestboxes. She was tired, cold and hungry and seemed unable to fly, with a damage wing. 

BCW rescued her and took her indoors to get warm, dry and fed:

Understandably she drank without hesitation and with great enthusiasm from our tray of honey water. 

After she was satisified she decided to explore the Kapok that was also put in her box. Well, she seemed to love this. She burrowed down and made a wee hidey-hole. 

she didn't stop there - she burrowed deep inside - just as bufftails do (especially when hibernating underground).

BCW was concerned at this stage, in case she had gone in there to die. But thankfully she didn't stay there but came out again to explore and have another drink.

She's left us with a bit of a dilemma about what to do with her. It does seem as though she can't fly, in which case if we set her outdoors she will ultimately perish. On the other hand, keeping her indoors seems somewhat cruel - she has an expected lifespan of 18 months, but she will be trapped and unable to fulfil her destiny during that time; or who knows, maybe she will even start laying and nest building! 

That would not be good indoors - so our best bet is to see if she will use one of the nest boxes outside. We may have to put her in there with food supplies and see if that is enough to keep her in there and maybe start nest building. If she does not stay in there, we could consider trapping her - but I really do not like this idea - and there is no guarantee she would start laying either. Plus, since, presumably, she hasn't mated yet, she will only lay boys, so she will not get any help making the nest. It's difficult to know what to do for the best. 

More details are on the technology page, but I'm using an ioBridge board to capture the data and push it to their web platform, whenceforth all manner of wonderful things can be done with it. 

I've been setting it up over the last week - getting to grips with the way the sensors would and the way data is recorded. I've pretty much got to grips with the basics, as well as some of the features that are possible such as twitter notifications.

The rain and wind and low temperatures continue to make getting in the garden to do jobs a very cold and messy (muddy) affair - notwithstanding, I did some of the setup in the garage, which included drilling through the wall for the wires and getting the network up and running.

getting the iobridge powered up and running in the garage - sensors routed through the wallI mounted a weatherproof box on the outside of the garage. This will contain an ambient light sensor, and some status LEDs (for example, a sunset/sunrise indicator) and a warning buzzer (e.g. for nest "over temperature")

outdoor iobridge sensorsThe white cables are the two temperature sensors - one for inside the nest, the other for the ambient temperature. 

This is the kind of output we're getting at the moment. Once it's been running a few days, I'll set up some rules (such as triggers on temperatures).

iobridge dashboard of bumblebee sensorsYou can see I've set up a "flap input". This is not installed yet, but the plan is to put a small switch on the wax-moth flap (made from aluminium foil) and count the amount of "flap" activity, which will give an indication of how many bumblebees are coming and going into the nest. Just need a dry, warmer day to get that done.