ColEval: Honeybee COLony Structure EVALuation for Field Surveys.

Area of Science:

• Apiculture and Bee Health
• Animal Ecology
• Quantitative Biology

Background:

• Assessing honeybee colony structure is crucial for understanding colony dynamics and evolution.
• Existing methods may lack standardization or be labor-intensive for large-scale surveys.
• There is a need for reproducible and objective methods to evaluate honeybee colony status.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce ColEval, a novel image-based method for evaluating honeybee colony structure.
• To provide a tool for tracking the evolution of colony size and composition over time.
• To enable objective comparison of colony evaluations and mitigate observer bias.

Main Methods:

• ColEval quantifies the surface area percentage of key colony components (bees, brood, honey, nectar, pollen) from images.
• It utilizes an online reference image bank for standardized human training and learning.
• The method incorporates algorithms to account for inter-observer variability.

Main Results:

• ColEval provides accurate measurements of honeybee colony composition.
• The procedure allows for the detection and correction of observer bias.
• It facilitates a posteriori comparisons between evaluations from different researchers.

Conclusions:

• ColEval is an effective tool for the quantitative assessment of honeybee colony structure.
• This method supports the development of applied and fundamental field research in apiculture.
• ColEval enables large-scale surveys and reliable tracking of colony evolution.