Can listening to bees help save them - and us?

Bees are in trouble, but we're not quite sure why.

It could be the overuse of insecticides; air pollution; warming temperatures; the varroa destructor mite; or even interference from electromagnetic radiation. Or it could be a combination of all these factors. But until we have more data, we won't know for sure. So the World Bee Project and IT firm Oracle are creating a global network of AI "smart hives" to give scientists real-time data into the relationships between bees and their environments. Up to six sensors will be mounted on hives, capturing the sound of the bees' buzzing, the movement of their feet and wings, the weight of their honey, the hive's humidity, as well as local weather and pollution levels. Oracle - which says the data will be owned by the World Bee Project - will use blockchain to verify that the data is coming from a particular hive and hasn't been tampered with. Simon Potts, professor of biodiversity at Reading University, says it can be quite hard with simple laboratory or field experiments to tease out what is affecting bees.

For instance, when bees swarm, the existing hive can lose half its population and half of its honey, as those bees about to leave will gorge themselves first. So beekeepers want to minimize swarming. Bees often swarm due to inadequate ventilation or high temperatures, so having live data on humidity, temperature and the weight of a hive's honey would all give early indications of problems. A beekeeper would then be able to take preventative action.

Why are bees so important?

Bees are crucial for agriculture: 1.4 billion farming jobs and three-quarters of the world's food supply - worth about $577bn (£447bn) a year - depending on the pollination of crops. And of the 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world's population, 70 are pollinated by domesticated and wild bees. "Honeybees are the single most important pollinator on the planet," says Prof Simon Potts.

In the past 50 years, the volume of agricultural production dependent on pollination has risen by 300%, yet at the same time, bee populations have plunged. In the UK, for instance, the number of honey bees fell by 54% between 1985 and 2005. In the US the number of honey-producing bee colonies fell from 5.9 million to 2.4 million between 1947 and 2008 - a fall of 59%. More than 40% of invertebrate pollinator species - particularly bees and butterflies - are facing extinction, and the potential impact of this on agricultural production is just one of the factors behind last year's stark warning on global food security from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Yet what scientists have lacked is a comprehensive set of data to analyze the rates of bee declines in different regions of the world and the differing reasons for this. In the UK, an invasive species that is now threatening honey bees is the Asian hornet. When the much larger hornet enters a hive, worker bees will surround it and effectively cook it - and themselves - to death by raising their own body temperatures. Live monitoring would again allow an earlier action to be taken in removing such predators. In Manchester, Cisco and the city's Mi-Idea innovation Centre have partnered with Australia's data innovation group, Data61, to track bees' movements by using IoT technology. The team wants to understand phenomena such as colony collapse disorder, which sees the worker bees disappearing and leaving the queen isolated. The project fits RFID [radio-frequency identification] chips safely onto individual bees so researchers can record their movements.