Papers › Tracking all members of a honey bee colony over their lifetime
Tracking all members of a honey bee colony over their lifetime
Franziska Boenisch, Benjamin Rosemann, Benjamin Wild, Fernando Wario, David Dormagen, Tim Landgraf
Computational approaches to the analysis of collective behavior in social insects increasingly rely on motion paths as an intermediate data layer from which one can infer individual behaviors or social interactions. Honey bees are a popular model for learning and memory. Previous experience has been shown to affect and modulate future social interactions. So far, no lifetime history observations have been reported for all bees of a colony. In a previous work we introduced a tracking system customized to track up to $4000$ bees over several weeks. In this contribution we present an in-depth description of the underlying multi-step algorithm which both produces the motion paths, and also improves the marker decoding accuracy significantly. We automatically tracked ∼2000 marked honey bees over 10 weeks with inexpensive recording hardware using markers without any error correction bits. We found that the proposed two-step tracking reduced incorrect ID decodings from initially ∼13% to around 2% post-tracking. Alongside this paper, we publish the first trajectory dataset for all bees in a colony, extracted from ∼ 4 million images. We invite researchers to join the collective scientific effort to investigate this intriguing animal system. All components of our system are open-source.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections