Assessing honeybee colony health using temperature time series
Karina Arias-Calluari1,2, Théotime Colin3, Tanya Latty2
1School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
|February 3, 2026
Summary
Honeybee colonies
Area of Science:
- Apiculture and insect behavior
- Environmental science and ecology
- Animal physiology
Background:
- Honeybee colonies face numerous stressors leading to colony collapse.
- Monitoring colony health and resilience is crucial for understanding stress impacts.
- Existing methods for assessing colony status can be invasive or costly.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and apply a novel methodology for diagnosing honeybee colony status.
- To quantify colony resilience using thermoregulatory capacity as a metric.
- To provide a practical, non-invasive bee-monitoring solution.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of time-series data, specifically hive core temperature relative to environmental temperature.
- Quantification of colony thermoregulatory capacity as a measure of resilience to environmental stressors.
- Statistical analysis of temperature data from 22 hives, including those that collapsed.
Main Results:
- Identified statistical signatures of stress correlating with colony stability or risk of failure.
- Developed a metric for thermoregulatory capacity to assess hive status.
- Observed distinct temperature patterns differentiating stable, warning, and collapsed hives.
Conclusions:
- A simple scale of hive status (stable, warning, collapse) can be derived from temperature measurements.
- Thermoregulatory capacity offers a cost-effective and practical method for bee monitoring.
- This approach enables early detection of stress and timely interventions to prevent colony collapse.
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