Clustering Honeybees by Its Daily Activity

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the activity of bees starting at 6 days old. The data was collected at the INRA (France) during 2014 and 2016. The activity is counted according to whether the bees enter or leave the hive. After data wrangling, we decided to analyze data corresponding to a period of 10 days. We use clustering method to determine bees with similar activity and to estimate the time during the day when the bees are most active. To achieve our objective, the data was analyzed in three different time periods in a day. One considering the daily activity during in two periods: morning and afternoon, then looking at activities in periods of 3 hours from 8:00am to 8:00pm and, finally looking at the activities hourly from 8:00am to 8:00pm. Our study found two clusters of bees and in one of them clearly the bees activity increased at the day 5. The smaller cluster included the most active bees representing about 24 percent of the total bees under study. Also, the highest activity of the bees was registered between 2:00pm until 3:00pm. A Chi-square test shows that there is a combined effect Treatment× Colony on the clusters formation.