The number of pollinator insect is in decline in Europe and this raises concerns about the supply of pollination services to agriculture. Thus, countries with a low number of honeybees are more vulnerable to negative shifts in wild pollinator communities. Consequently, the demand for honeybee pollination is higher than ever but beekeepers are also very concerned by the strength of their colonies. To measure this factor, a very important indicator to take into account is the flight activity at the beehive entrance. A quantitative measure of the activity can be related to the environment and does not only benefit beekeepers but scientists too. In this paper, we present a complete method of measuring this activity. It is represented by the number of bees going in or out of the beehive. The developed method is divided in three parts: the first one consists in bee detection thanks to several image transformations using background subtraction and ellipse approximations. The second one is about tracking bees, by assuming their future positions in order to determine whether they are going in or getting out of the beehive. The last one consists in counting the bees. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that our system created with limited resources can be used to precisely measure the flight activity at the beehive entrance.
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