Bee Tracker software
The Bee Tracker software is able to recognize bees entering and leaving cavities at a nesting unit. Individual bees can be identified if they are marked with ID tags from marking kits conventionally used for honeybee queen rearing (Fig. 1). In the published open-source version of the software digits from 1 to 8 and the colors white, yellow and green (up to 24 unique digit-color combinations) can be recognized. Moreover, the software can identify each nesting cavity of nesting units (constructed as in Fig. 1). Cavities get an ID based on their position in the nesting unit (according to its “row” and “column” in the nesting unit, see manual provided in the Supporting Information for further details). In the published version of the software, cavities of up to 12 rows and 10 columns (up to 120 cavities) per nesting unit can be identified. The software is further capable to detect and measure the entering and leaving of a cavity by an individual bee and the video timestamp of each of these events. From the collected list of events and some set input parameters (see below), the software can assign females to the cavity they are nesting in, calculate flight duration and count the number of cavities a bee probes until it finds the one it is nesting in (nest orientation; see Artz & Pitts-Singer, 2015).
Before the software can be used for the collection of this data, the precision of the software needs to be evaluated for the setup in use and, if unsatisfactory, the software must be trained on a set of representative videos. The machine learning network can further be used to expand the spectra of bee and cavity IDs that the software is able to recognize.