Winter Meeting - Chloe Davis from the Better-B Project

When: Thursday April 16th, 18:45 for 19:00

Where: The Victory Pavilion, Nowton Road, Bury IP33 2BT

Plenty of free parking available.

Chloe is a researcher from Nottingham Trent University on the Better-B project with Professor Martin Bencsik. The European project aims to improve the resilience of beekeeping to abiotic stresses. Her specific task is to try to create varroa-resistant colonies by following a Dutch breeding protocol. This includes the automated monitoring of colonies, using a device to monitor the mass, acoustics and temperature of the colonies.

Honey bee colonies presently face numerous challenges, including pests, diseases, and environmental stresses, which threaten their survival and productivity. Chloe will present ongoing research which explores the use of unsupervised machine learning, specifically principal component analysis (PCA), to analyse hive weight data and detect colonies underperforming. The algorithm has successfully flagged colonies suffering from disorders such as queenlessness, nosema, and varroa mite infestation, corroborated by physical inspections. The project now aims to differentiate surviving varroa-resistant colonies from failing colonies.