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History and Rationale of the Bee Health Guru App
History and Rationale
The Bee Health Guru smartphone application is designed for electronic colony health management. It is based on analyzing the sounds of a honey bee colony and is the culmination of over ten years of intensive research. The app, however, will not be accurate until it is tuned for a variety of smartphones, as well as regional variations in bee colony sound. This is a long-term project. The exact timing for when the tuning will be completed is unknown, as its history has already shown.
In 2017, we mistakenly thought we'd have the app available in 90 days after initial Beta testing. However, based on feedback and issues discovered when the app was being used by beekeepers in other countries - e.g., the bees produce somewhat different sounds compared to North American bees, some upload systems stalled, we ended up making some substantive changes in the app. At that point, we set up a Kickstarter Project (May 2019) to recruit collaborators and provide funding for going forward with the tuning of the app.
Bee Health Guru works very well with high-end digital recorders and desktop computers. Until recently, smartphones were too slow. With version 6 of the iPhone and Android operating systems, performance improved. By version 8, analyses on top-of-the-line phones took less than 15 seconds. However, the quality of internal microphones and audio cards vary by phone brand and phone model. In addition, as mentioned, we have discovered that bees have regional accents.
Again, before the app can be trusted as a reliable, accurate diagnostic instrument, we need to screen phones for the quality of the recordings and tune the app for smartphones. To do that, we need app recordings, analyses, and colony inspection reports. The more recordings we get, for example, of colonies without laying queens versus colonies with laying queens, the better we can tune the app to recognize this condition. We literally train the app. It learns the sound patterns. But it doesn't learn on the phone itself. That's why we need to tune the app. The more users, the more reports, the more areas, the better the tune. We need to do this for all eight of the app's colony health factors.
Unfortunately, just as we completed the May Kickstarter Project, our database service and upload system were bought out by a larger company, who radically increased prices. We have been working hard throughout June and July to swap out the backend database to our Bee Health Guru app. We have now completed that work. It was more extensive than one might imagine: first we had to select a new cloud provider, then we had to set up and configure the new solution, then we had to move our old data over and test that it was adequately there, then we had to send new data through the app and test that that data got into the new database, and finally we had to make sure we could access everything we needed in our new database.
We are starting this BHGA citizen science research project with the funding and participation of 653 Kickstarter backers. They should receive a pre-release version of the app (August 2019).
.
We are now at what we believe is the very last step: configuring the app stores (Google and Apple) so that we can get the Bee Health Guru app to our official backers. Our most recent test of the apps stores threw up an error in that the app stores did not recognize the email addresses that we had registered in their systems! We had to figure out why Apple and Google do not want to have our app, but we think we now have it figured out. However, we strongly recommend that our Kickstarter participants read the App store download instructions before attempting to install the app. Android and iPhone stores have different installation procedures.
Once tuned, the app is expected to be available in the Google and iPhone apps stores for purchase by small scale beekeepers or by subscription for professional beekeepers. Please be patient. Notices will be posted when each version of the app is accessible through the app stores. We anticipate a Community version of the app for backyard and small scale beekeepers. We have in development a Pro version for Commercial beekeepers. The Commercial app will allow crew members to scan lots of colonies. A summary report of each day's testing will be automatically compiled and sent to the appropriate field manager or owner.
In all cases, our final objective is to provide in close to real-time, maps of incident reports from emergent bee health issues, as well as mapping of any spread of emergent problems. With our Cloud-based reporting, we should be able to automate this type of mapping, similar to the maps that the USA's Center for Disease Control provides to track human health issues such as the annual appearance and spread of influenza and measles outbreaks.
The Bee Health Guru smartphone application is designed for electronic colony health management. It is based on analyzing the sounds of a honey bee colony and is the culmination of over ten years of intensive research. The app, however, will not be accurate until it is tuned for a variety of smartphones, as well as regional variations in bee colony sound. This is a long-term project. The exact timing for when the tuning will be completed is unknown, as its history has already shown.
In 2017, we mistakenly thought we'd have the app available in 90 days after initial Beta testing. However, based on feedback and issues discovered when the app was being used by beekeepers in other countries - e.g., the bees produce somewhat different sounds compared to North American bees, some upload systems stalled, we ended up making some substantive changes in the app. At that point, we set up a Kickstarter Project (May 2019) to recruit collaborators and provide funding for going forward with the tuning of the app.
Bee Health Guru works very well with high-end digital recorders and desktop computers. Until recently, smartphones were too slow. With version 6 of the iPhone and Android operating systems, performance improved. By version 8, analyses on top-of-the-line phones took less than 15 seconds. However, the quality of internal microphones and audio cards vary by phone brand and phone model. In addition, as mentioned, we have discovered that bees have regional accents.
Again, before the app can be trusted as a reliable, accurate diagnostic instrument, we need to screen phones for the quality of the recordings and tune the app for smartphones. To do that, we need app recordings, analyses, and colony inspection reports. The more recordings we get, for example, of colonies without laying queens versus colonies with laying queens, the better we can tune the app to recognize this condition. We literally train the app. It learns the sound patterns. But it doesn't learn on the phone itself. That's why we need to tune the app. The more users, the more reports, the more areas, the better the tune. We need to do this for all eight of the app's colony health factors.
Unfortunately, just as we completed the May Kickstarter Project, our database service and upload system were bought out by a larger company, who radically increased prices. We have been working hard throughout June and July to swap out the backend database to our Bee Health Guru app. We have now completed that work. It was more extensive than one might imagine: first we had to select a new cloud provider, then we had to set up and configure the new solution, then we had to move our old data over and test that it was adequately there, then we had to send new data through the app and test that that data got into the new database, and finally we had to make sure we could access everything we needed in our new database.
We are starting this BHGA citizen science research project with the funding and participation of 653 Kickstarter backers. They should receive a pre-release version of the app (August 2019).
.
We are now at what we believe is the very last step: configuring the app stores (Google and Apple) so that we can get the Bee Health Guru app to our official backers. Our most recent test of the apps stores threw up an error in that the app stores did not recognize the email addresses that we had registered in their systems! We had to figure out why Apple and Google do not want to have our app, but we think we now have it figured out. However, we strongly recommend that our Kickstarter participants read the App store download instructions before attempting to install the app. Android and iPhone stores have different installation procedures.
Once tuned, the app is expected to be available in the Google and iPhone apps stores for purchase by small scale beekeepers or by subscription for professional beekeepers. Please be patient. Notices will be posted when each version of the app is accessible through the app stores. We anticipate a Community version of the app for backyard and small scale beekeepers. We have in development a Pro version for Commercial beekeepers. The Commercial app will allow crew members to scan lots of colonies. A summary report of each day's testing will be automatically compiled and sent to the appropriate field manager or owner.
In all cases, our final objective is to provide in close to real-time, maps of incident reports from emergent bee health issues, as well as mapping of any spread of emergent problems. With our Cloud-based reporting, we should be able to automate this type of mapping, similar to the maps that the USA's Center for Disease Control provides to track human health issues such as the annual appearance and spread of influenza and measles outbreaks.
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