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Early warning protection for bees: from sniffer dogs to smartphone apps


American Foulbrood (AFB) disease kills bees. It’s a bacterial disease that affects honeybees in the larval stage of their development. The infected larvae die and rot in the bee hives, releasing infectious spores. If these spores become airborne, they can drift into another bee hive and infect more bee larvae. Therefore it’s important to detect AFB and the spores before more bee hives are infected. If a hive is infected, bee keepers destroy the whole hive because there’s no other way of preventing the disease. Early detection can save hives from being destroyed.
The rotting larvae emit a scent—not detected by humans. However, trained bee sniffing dogs can smell it. Baz, a four-year-old black Labrador in Australia, has been trained to detect AFB. Once trained, he had to pass a test to become a fully qualified AFB early warning detector. In an apiary with 51 hives with AFB purposefully added to some of them, it took Baz only 45 minutes to assess all hives. Humans took 3 days to do this task. Baz identified AFB with 100% accuracy compared with a team of 5 humans who could identify AFB with 76% accuracy. This project was funed by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) Honeybee R&D Program and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in Queensland, Australia (www.rirdc.gov.au).
Another problem for bees is the intrusion of exotic bees from other countries that spread pests, such as the Varroa mite, which have been devastating honeybee industries worldwide. Early detection of unwanted exotic bees before they come into the country would therefore prevent a wider outbreak of mites. Currently bait boxes are placed near Australian ports to attract non-Australian bees. These bait boxes are monitored manually by apiary officers. But now there is a smartphone app that can monitor the bait boxes remotely 24 hours a day, seven days a week—reducing costs, saving time, and improving biosecurity.
Currently two bait boxes—in Brisbane and Cairns—are photographed every 15 minutes and the image of the inside of the boxes is uploaded to the internet. The smartphone app can effectively and efficiently detect an exotic bee incursion early. This project was funded by the Pollination Program of the RIRDC and Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) and is being conducted by the National Center for Engineering Agriculture at the University of Southern Queensland (www.rirdc.gov.au).

Rural Diversity, RIRDC, Issue No. 12, WINTER 2013
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