Home▸Entomology & Insect Behaviour▸Listening to the Hive: Acoustic Monitoring as a Beekeeping Research Tool

🎧 Listening to the Hive: Acoustic Monitoring as a Beekeeping Research Tool

An interactive 3D hive research rig: reposition the microphone, and change sample rate and bit depth to see how equipment and protocol choices affect whether recorded hive sound is usable data.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DModerate60 FPS

A 3D hive research rig where you reposition a probe microphone along a rail and change sample rate and bit depth, watching a live oscilloscope compare the true buzz waveform against what your recording settings actually capture.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Recorded hive sound is only as good as the setup that captured it: signal strength falls off with mic distance from the brood nest, too low a sample rate causes aliasing (Nyquist–Shannon theorem), and too few bits adds a quantization noise floor that can bury a quiet signal.

🎮 How to Use

Set the colony's activity level, then slide the microphone along its rail and adjust sample rate and bit depth. Watch the oscilloscope's stepped trace diverge from the true waveform, and the SNR, Nyquist margin and research-grade badge respond in real time.

💡 Did You Know?

Because opening a hive to inspect it disturbs the colony and only ever captures one moment, researchers rely on consistent microphone placement and recording settings so that continuous acoustic data can be meaningfully compared across hives and dates.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D hive research rig: reposition the microphone, and change sample rate and bit depth to see how equipment and protocol choices affect whether recorded hive sound is usable data.

Three.jsacoustic-monitoringbioacousticsbeekeepingentomologysignal-processing

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install