Portuguese bees can now count on the NOS AI-belha solution, based on 5G and artificial intelligence (AI), to assess the health of their hives through sound, which will be piloted for at least six months.
“The AI-belha solution follows on from the ‘Enthusiasmometer’, launched at NOS Alive 2023,” says João Ferreira.
“Following its strategy of ‘technological transposition’ to other use cases, the team thus wanted to breathe new life into the basic sound analytics technology, but now in a field more associated with sustainability, in this case in particular pollinators that are critical to the survival of all species on the planet,” explains the director of NOS Inovação.
This solution will now be used to detect the presence of the queen bee and assess the health and behavior of the hives.
In short, beekeepers “just have to bring their 5G smartphone close to the hive and pick up the sound emitted by the bees, just as if it were a phone call,” says NOS.
The audio collected is sent in real time to a cloud server where, “through artificial intelligence, the various types of noise are analyzed”, and the result will be the identification of the presence or absence of the queen bee through the sound emitted by the bees, as well as the detection of other sound patterns that may indicate negative signs in the health of the hive, adds the company.
This solution “took approximately two months to implement, including the tasks of interpreting the problem, searching for quality data, processing the data and implementing a multi-model approach that would allow us to better respond to the proposed challenge,” he said.
The director of NOS Inovação stresses that “this work has been submitted to an international conference on Artificial Intelligence of the IEEE – the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to the advancement of technology for the benefit of humanity”.
Asked how the idea came about, João Ferreira pointed out that NOS believes that “audio goes beyond basic communication and can be an extremely rich source of data”.
With AI analysis, “we have the ability to extract valuable ‘insights’ and take action based on that information in a variety of scenarios, from music events, such as NOS Alive, to monitoring beehives, as is the case today.”
“It is the company’s policy to innovate for a better future and innovation involves a process of experimenting, testing and implementing various technological ‘enablers’ that are suitable not only for a specific use case, but which can be applied relatively easily in other areas,” he says.
So, “after the ‘Enthusiómotro’, we organized several brainstorming sessions, from which several ideas emerged”, and “through our ‘idea expansion’ process, AI-bees ended up being the one chosen for a shorter-term solution”, he says.
Meanwhile, “we’ve already started contacting several beekeepers and the first tests should start this spring,” says João Ferreira.
“So far, we’ve had a good reception to the project” and “our expectation, in addition to testing and collecting a national dataset, is also to have feedback on how useful this solution is for beekeepers and how it can be improved in a process of co-creation, development and evaluation with the end users”, he stresses.
This “is a project funded solely and exclusively by the company, which demonstrates its total commitment not only to Research and Innovation, but also to other causes that are not exclusive to NOS’ core business”, reinforces João Ferreira, who adds that the company is currently in contact with several individual beekeepers and associations nationwide.
The duration of the project “will depend on the data we manage to acquire, both in quantity and (especially) quality” and “considering that we also want to get feedback from beekeepers, both in terms of the reliability of the models and the usability of the solution, we estimate that the pilot will run for at least six months”.
