Automatic Tracking of Honeybee Dancer’ and Follower’ Walking Trajectories

Abstract

Analyzing communications between the honeybee waggle dancers and their followers in their hive is one of the most important and interesting issues to reveal a mechanism of honeybee’s language. In general, these behavior analyses have been usually conducted by extracting honeybee’s walking trajectories from recorded long-time video data manually. To decrease the hard work of observers and their artificial errors, we have previously proposed an automatic tracking algorithm of multiple honeybees using image processing. Besides, we have constructed an automatic recording system for long-term tracking of honeybee behaviors in an observation hive. Using this system, we recorded the hive and its corridor to the field over 4 weeks in June 2016. Finally, we obtained video data over 20TB per a month. Analyzing honeybee’s behavior from tahis enormous amount of data is required an extremely long time even if using a high spec computer. In order to deal with this issue, we first extracted the area and time of waggle dance from the recorded video data using a preprocessing based on frame-difference approach. Then we applied our tracking algorithm for the extracted partial video data. In the preliminary experiment, we conducted the automatic tracking of the waggle dancers and their followers for 13-hour video data.