I've chopped off a lot of the graph to the left as nothing much was happening, but more recently 1. A swarm appeared in the apiary but did not all go into the catch hive, shown encircled in red. 2. A swarm was caught inside the catch hive, circled by green.
In both cases, there seems to be evidence of scouting behaviour prior to the swarm arriving and this was confirmed by human eyeball observations. There's a couple of strong peaks for CO2 in the red circle and one strong peak in the green zone. It would be great if another swarm arrived as this would re-enforce the current patterns (or maybe not!)
This very short video shows why it's important to move the new green box slowly, one step at a time. After moving it about 1/2 meter downwards, quite a few of the foraging bees have started to try and get back into the original white box. Fortunately, I knew they would probably try to do this and had the door closed. When all the bees have got accustomed to the new green box position, it can be moved down another couple of ladder rungs.
The white box with the LoRa Darkstar attached was opened up and was found to contain a large swarm of bees, as expected. The bees needed to be transferred into another box, the green one, so that they can be removed from the top of the tree back down to ground level, leaving the white box in the tree to catch or detect another swarm. Howver, it's not possible to do the whole operation in one stage as the bees need time to re-orientate. The proceedure is as follows:
Put the green box in the original position of the white box with the door open.
Transfer all the bees from the white box to the green one by moving the frames and shaking out any stragglers.
Close the door on the white box and position on top of the green one.
Gradually move the green box down the ladder - about 1 foot per day.
Put some old frames back in the white box and open the door again.
CO2 levels have just peaked at 855 ppm (ambient level is 420) which indicates intense scouting or even a swarm taking up permanent residence. If the level stays high during the night, this could indicate permanent occupation. Otherwise, it could take a day or two for the actual swarm to arrive.
If you look carefully inside the red disc near the entry hole there is a scout bee, probably from another hive starting to go into swarm mode. However, one single bee is not likely to affect the inside CO2 levels very much!
It would have been nice to put up a photo of the actual swarm, but it was all a bit frantic trying to catch it before it absconded to under the neighbour's facia board or into the inside of a post box. But the data is equally of interest:
The underlying theory of the whole thing is that measuring CO2 levels in the catch hive can help indicate and ultimately predict swarming. There's a whole load of other factors which are recorded, but CO2 was thought to be the most important. One of the great things about XGBoost is that it can automatically tell us which factor is ACTUALLY most important with a nice graphical display, but this will all come later when we have a bit more data to work with. One swarm aint enough.
Fortunately, I set the system up to calculate the max CO2 value in the last 48 hours as I knew that scouting bees would be active before the swarm actually materialized. What is really strange is that the scouting bees seem to have decided to spend the night in the catch hive, no doubt to check out the furnishings and raid the mini bar. After the swarm has now been collected and re-housed the CO2 patterns seem to have returned to normal.
Another indicator that I thought might be important is the gadget temperature since it already has a temperature sensor in it and is in full sunlight, just like a bee hive. It gets hot, but bees like this degree of heat and are more than capable of ventilating the hive when necessary.
Capt. Flatus O'Flaherty ☠
