Hi volunteers,

TL;DR First Fife Beekeepers meeting of the semester at 2:15pm this Wednesday the 14^th of October; come along if you’re new and learn how you can help save bees!

What is Fife Beekeepers?

Fife Beekeepers (FB) is a Sustainability Side Project organised by the School of Computer Science’s Sustainability Rep, Tamra Chan.

The purpose of the project is to create a computer vision system capable of counting parasites (Varroa Destructor, Tropilaelaps, etc.) on the sticky boards that beekeepers place under their hives.

Accurate tallies of parasites on these boards are used by beekeepers to evaluate the level of infection in the hive, and determine when and how much anti-parasite fumigation to apply.

The chemical used for this is damaging to the hive and its environment; bees and beekeepers alike would benefit greatly from technology allowing them to reduce its use. That’s where we come in.

What’s been done so far

Last year, we began with research of existing solutions, our clients’ requirements, and various technologies we might use.

In April of this year, the FB team visited the apiaries at Balcormo Farm, where Andy from Fife Beekeepers showed us their hives and taught us about beekeeping.

We found out that this problem has been considered before, and some previous work demonstrated that the object detection task is solvable by a YOLOv11 Nano model at uniform distances and angles from well-defined white boards with grids (An AI-Based Open-Source Software for Varroa Mite Fall Analysis in Honeybee Colonies).

What’s next

We want to build on the existing work and improve it to:

• Improve robustness to varying lighting conditions, perspectives, and scales

• Improve performance for deployment onto consumer devices including mobile phones

• (potentially) Address additional parasites, including Tropilaeleps, which is migrating towards the UK at the moment.

Your involvement

If this sounds interesting to you or you can see yourself wanting to help out in some way, come learn about it and meet the team at our first meeting of the Semester!

It’ll be online and in-person at the Jack Cole Building, at 2:15pm this Wednesday the 14^th of October.

You can show up just to hear more, and there’s no commitment or sign-up required. This is a low-stakes environment where we aim to learn while helping our community.

If you can’t make it, feel free to join our WhatsApp community.

This will add you to the Sustainability Side Projects community, where you can find the Fife Beekeepers group chat (as well as our other projects).

Happy Week 5!

— Maxence Morel Dierckx