# Use of thermal cameras for frame count inspection in the Almonds?



## Honey-4-All (Dec 19, 2008)

Any advice in the planning and implementation of this is much appreciated.


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

I used a high end thermal image gun in my wintering shed, and set out a criteria to see if I could indeed determine the hives strength while sitting in the shed by looking at the hive's heat signature. 

It was a neat project but I ended up deciding looking into the front entrance of the hive showed me more than the gun was showing, using the gun did not prove useful. I also found some hives shed more heat than others with exactly the same cluster size. 

To use the gun outdoors, I would suggest to use the gun at night to keep your reflected heat from the sun out and it will help keep the pic more consistant. Working during the cool period of the night will help express the hives heat signature clearly.

It took me a while to realize there is a focus, and that works really well. I also locked in the scale to keep the gun from jumping the scale around.


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

shows the row of hives, each expressing a heat signature


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

This picture shows two hot hives. four out of the six hives around these two hot hives have identical sized clusters.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Ian said:


> This picture shows two hot hives. four out of the six hives around these two hot hives have identical sized clusters.


That makes me wonder out loud, are the hot ones incubating some brood ?


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

H4A,

How sensitive would the high end equipment be? It seems like you would need almost a 3D image. Front, side, and top. I would assume the "clusters" would be pretty well centered at this point. Would you account for or standardize for outside temp. and cluster density and activity.

G2, makes a good point. Another thing to consider is disease. Just a general observation, but when pulling samples for tracheal and nosema in the winter, colonies with higher disease levels tended to be more active/restless. I could give a good guess as to what I would later find in the samples, by the pattern of the melted snow on top of the colonies.


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## rastajey (Jan 24, 2016)

Just wondering if your project did work honey-4-all?
I would like to be able to do the same over here with blueberry pollination hive.
do some one got a camera strong enough to see frame of bee thru top or side?
please let me know.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

I think you would have to programmatically calibrate the thermal images and use software to give you the output data based on the image taken. You wouldn't just point and shoot and look at the image yourself. With the proper filters in place, I'm betting it could be pretty accurate. I think you would need to know some variables before hand though, like does plastic foundation make any difference, all wood frames, or all plastic frames as well. I think the core of the cluster would be where you need to focus on regardless though, you wouldn't want to include the outsides of the thermal signature and as long as distance and frame sizes are calibrated, something that could calculate the core size of the thermal signature would be the way to go to extrapolate frame counts.


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## Markt (Feb 8, 2012)

I tried this recently with much the same result as Ian... I could generally only see what was good or bad by how bright the entrance was. Really couldn't get much of a read through the wood of the boxes the way I was hoping. Though with a better camera and some more expertise than I have who knows?


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