Brazilian application to monitor the disappearance of bees

Date:04-11-2014

A researcher from the Sao Paulo University Riberao Preto and his son, a publicist, created a computer, smart phone and tablet application to monitor the disappearance of bee colonies. The Bee Alert, as the application was baptized, is free and is available online.

Bees are a key piece for agriculture and, thus, for the food on our plate. These insects pollinate crops of fruit, vegetables and grains. For the past eight years, beekeepers around the world have realized that their colonies are decreasing.

Among the reasons that have already been given to explain the decrease of populations, are viruses, fungi, bacteria and pesticide use. According to data of the Coloss, a group of scientists from several countries that studies the disappearance of bees, some regions of Europe lost up to 53% of their colonies.

Although the phenomenon has been detected in Brazil, the dimension is not yet known, an answer that the designers of the application want to help discover. "The platform is an online tool for beekeepers, meliponicultures and the scientific community, who can make records of the disappearance or significant losses of bees in apiaries," says publicist Daniel Malusá Gonçalves, who developed the application with his father, the biologist Lionel Segui Gonçalves, a researcher at USP Riberao Preto and President of apiculture and meliponiculture technology center of Rio Grande do Norte (Cetapis). The Bee Alert is part of the Bee or not to be? created by Lionel to protect bees.

The application will work in a simple way: the producer or the researcher will log the location of their Apiary and, in the event of disappearance of bees, will inform the intensity of disappearance (how many hives were hurt and what percentage of loss), the possible causes (diseases, pests and climate, for example) and the losses. In addition, the producer or the researcher must declare if the bugs are gone or have migrated to nearby areas. "We are in an initial stage and we know that we are going to face difficulties, as the low access to technology by beekeepers and their fear of exposing the problem," says Daniel.

The tool is available in Portuguese, with the promise that it will be available in Spanish and English next month. "We believe that the application can be used in other countries, because we face similar problems and challenges when it comes to the protection of bees," says Daniel.