BeePhon: A Web-Application for Beehive Audio Exploration

Honey bees are dying at an alarming rate due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Monitoring honey beehives using the audio and video recordings obtained from the beehives has been made possible with the availability of embedded systems such as Raspberry Pis. Conveniently analyzing a large number of audio files obtained from the hives is challenging but can provide an opportunity to learn about the behavior of the bees. BeePhon is a system of tools developed to enable exploratory analysis of audio recordings, taken from inside honey beehives, and efficiently annotate them. It primarily consists of a web-application user interface for performing Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). Labeled data and components are stored in a database and can be used to improve subsequent decompositions. Using this system we annotated over 2000 audio files in four months.