## 4 Agricultural and Research Applications  
### Improving Apiary Management  
Technologies described herein provide an overview of modern tools which can be used individually and in combinations for better bee management and for innovative research regarding bees, pollinators, crops, and agro-ecosystems. Many of these methods and devices came about because the US military wanted rapid communication, especially if bees were to be used for surveillance to protect against releases  
Figure 12: **(a)** Extreme high resolution (307,200 radiometric pixels) image of two bee colonies with feeder on nearest hive; **(b)** Picture in picture, high resolution, (76,800 radiometric pixels); MSX technology fuses infrared and visible light images; **(c)** Moderate resolution (19,200 radiometric pixels); thermal image only of pallets of bee hives stacked in a wintering shed; **(d)** Moderate resolution (19,200 radiometric pixels) image of two queen cells removed from an incubator and left at room temperature for five minutes. Cell on left has stillborn queen; cell on right has live queen. of chemical and biological warfare agents. These same technologies can now provide early warnings of pesticide incidents to beekeepers and possibly warn of the arrival of new pests and diseases in bees, crops, and orchards. For large-scale commercial beekeepers who may manage thousands or tens of thousands of colonies, often located over large areas, sometimes even on opposite coasts, there are now options for monitoring colony status in remote areas without having to send a crew to check them. Others of these new tools may reduce or eliminate the need to open colonies to visually inspect them or, at least, to identify colonies that need attention. Precision agriculture is already changing the science, environmental practices, and economics of livestock and crop management, and concurrently of crop science, environmental practices, and production economics. The latter is especially important to producers of agricultural commodities because it can boost their competitiveness through more efficient practices by reducing costs and, hopefully, increasing yields. The honey bee industry has not had anything similar to the RFIDS used with cattle or GPS/Satellite yield mapping of crops. Similarly, bee and pollinator science has been held back, especially for field studies, by a lack of real-time quantitative data acquisition systems. Publication of the honey bee genome [105] was a milestone in understanding bees at a molecular level. We anticipate that hive and bee monitoring technologies may have a similar transformative effect on bees, pollination, and crops. New bee-centric technologies for field use, and, equally important, the transfer of these technologies from research and military applications into affordable, reliable, commercially available devices for use by researchers, beekeepers, and growers are essential given current concerns about worldwide declines of pollinators. Better data acquisition with sophisticated analysis, modeling, and visualization programs offers significant potential for rapidly improving bee management and bee science, especially with respect to issues such as pollinator efficacy, seed production, and plant security. Obviously, a beekeeper with apiaries hundreds of kilometers away can save a considerable amount of money by having a report delivered to a cell phone, saving the cost of salaries, employee benefits such as workman's compensation insurance, fuel, meals, and lodging expenses of sending a crew to check the distant colonies. For that purpose, a Scale Hive and some basic weather information can be invaluable. In trying to detect a pesticide exposure incident, hive weight is a relatively insensitive factor, whereas a bi-directional bee counter can readily identify an event and provide accurate, time-related data concerning the time, date, and degree of loss by reporting the number of bees leaving the hive and how many returned.