Recording first sounds
Since the last post, we have started in earnest to work on our ICAT funded project to dive deeper into the aural world of honey bees. Ricardo Burdisso has recruited engineering student Tianyu Zhao to work with us for the summer. Tanya will help us build a microphone array to investigate the acoustic properties of the waggle dance.
Ricardo and Tianyu were keen to see the bees for the first time. To give them an opportunity and at the same time get some first sound recordings from a hive, I took them to the field when we assembled the rest of the observation hives for this year's calibration experiments. When we open hives, we can often observe eager dancers on the wax combs, even if we remove the combs from the hive. In the below picture taken by Ricardo, I am trying to get a recording of such a dance.
I can be seen holding the microphone which was connected to the recording equipment in Ricardo's car. This would have been an ideal opportunity to get some material for lab testing of the microphone array. Unfortunately, the bees were not dancing that day, so that we only obtained background noise.
Nevertheless, Ricardo and Tianyu still got to see the observation hives with which they will be working eventually:
Since then, Tianyu and Ricardo have calibrated microphones and designed the microphone array:
In mid-August we should be ready to start recording directly from the dance floor of an observation hive!