Intel's Edison joins the quest to save the bees

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Since January 2014, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation has been using (radio-frequency identification) RFID tags to track bees. These tiny chips monitor the movements of the bees, with a view toward finding out where the insects go, and what role those places may play in colony collapse disorder, the mysterious phenomenon of disappearing bees.

 

 

 

Raspberry Pi was launched as an educational tool, on the back of its founders’ concerns that kids and amateurs had stopped “tinkering” with programming. It’s grown to become a huge success story, selling around six million units, and now has the backing of Microsoft, which handed over free access to Windows 10 for the update, Raspberry Pi 2.
 

With success, Intel joins the race with Edison.

 

Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and chipmaker Intel have joined forces to try to solve the mystery of why the world’s bee population is nose diving, a trend that could have disastrous consequences for global food security.

 

In the Global Initiative for Honey Bee Health project, scientists have glued tiny radio frequency identification tags to the backs of 15,000 bees so far in Australia and Brazil, in a painstaking manual operation that includes refrigerating the insects.

 

• The tags are read by sensors which track bee movements as they enter hives and feeders, just as cameras scan a car’s e-tag on to a tollway.
   
• The data is then sent to ­customisable Intel Edison compute boards nearby and from there to the cloud for analysis and reporting.

• The Hitachi-made RFID chips are minuscule: 2.5 x 2.5 x 4mm and just 5.4 milligrams, which is a third of what bees can carry.

Researchers have so far attributed the collapse of entire bee colonies to colony collapse disorder but are yet to single out a key cause. Pesticides, fungicides, parasites, air pollution, water contamination, a reduction in genetic diversity and more frequent extreme weather events are all cited as potential factors.

 

In addition to those stresses we have the mismanagement of hives ... caused by transport of hives around, You go to a hive and you see 50,000 bees working happily on one day, the next day you go and all the bees are gone or all the bees are dead - Professor Paulo de Souza, Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader

Professor de Souza cited Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the originator of Moore’s law that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years — as inspiring the reduction in transistor size that made this technology possible.

The system includes sensors that measure temperature, ­humidity and solar radiation.

 

The set-up costs $400 per hive and so far 20 hives are being monitored in Australia and Brazil. Hives in Mexico, Costa Rica, ­Argentina and Britain will be monitored and British researchers are monitoring bees in Chernobyl, Ukraine in the wake of the nuclear accident there in 1986.
 

What happens if all bees die. and why are they essential for the ecology. 

Source : http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/intels-edison-joins-the-quest-to-save-the-bees/

[Slinkey]

First time hearing about this.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

First time hearing about this.

The bee problem is a real problem that exists long before. the same pesticide that's suppose to cure the corns with their epidemic disease is also causing bees to shrink their colonies drastically. and recently there have been cases those bees are abandoning their colonies out of no where and no one knows that's happening to them yet. 

[Yoinkerman]

The latest candidate I heard was the neo-nic based pesticides everything is coated in.

[JAKEBAB]

Damn, i need my honey  

 

Seriously though am i reading this right, they freeze the bee then bring it back to life? Why can't we do this with Humans then? I know bee, human real different but surely it would have lead to some sort of advancement?

[BuckGup]

Bees have been dying for years and years now. They found it was caused by fungus that grows because of the pesticides sprayed by farmers

[cesrai]

Bees have been dying for years and years now. They found it was caused by fungus that grows because of the pesticides sprayed by farmers

Source ?

[BuckGup]

Source ?

A NOVA I watched in 2009

[atrash]

Without the bees, our ecosystem will be fucked up real good. 

[jarr456]

I really need to stop hoarding bees