Unusual meeting of scientific disciplines: lecture on honey bee biology at FAS

Almost a hundred interested people came to the lecture on honey bees on 22 February 2024. In addition to the general public, the beekeeping community was strongly represented in the audience, as well as colleagues from the Faculty of Applied Sciences (FAS) and other parts of the university.

The invitation to give a lecture was accepted by the well-known expert and popularizer of beekeeping Ing. Dalibor Titěra, CSc. He interspersed an engaging explanation of the situations that bees experience during their life cycle with video demonstrations made by the team of German researcher Paul Siefert from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He used a specially adapted industrial camera to record what was happening in the colony over a period of several years. The video clips presented took the audience inside the hive and allowed them to observe the details of bee behavior and typical events that have been repeated in bee colonies for more than 80 million years.

The fact that this is an interesting and actual topic was evidenced not only by the large attendance, but also by a number of questions from the audience. The lecture was also held in connection with the ongoing research The study of the climate change on honey bee colonies through biological analysis and artificial intelligence, in which experts from the Department of Cybernetics at FAS are also participating. The other participating institutions are the Biological Centre of the CAS and the Department of Entomology and Nematology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (USA). The joint project, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science and running from 2023 (until 2027), is expected to produce unique data using artificial intelligence and machine learning methods combined with biochemical, physiological and behavioral analyses.

Also at FAV, it is possible to encounter beehives, which provide invaluable data for understanding the processes taking place in bee colonies. "Deepening the knowledge about the behavior of beehives in relation to climatic and meteorological changes is thus the main benefit of the project," said Jindřich Liška on behalf of the organizers of this interesting and unusual lecture at the technical faculty.

Project No. LUAUS23128 is implemented under the INTER-EXCELLENCE II programme, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Czech Republic