Measuring factors affecting honey bee attraction to soybeans using bioacoustics monitoring

Honey bee foraging activity in four soybean fields during the blooming period (R2-R3), as well as before or after bloom, was recorded continuously using Sony ICD-PX370 audio recorders affixed to a wooden stake and placed below the soybean canopy, at the height of the highest flowers, approximately 35 m from the field edge. Continuous recordings were broken into 1 hour chunks and recording sequences made at night were discarded. The wingbeat frequency of honey bees (234±13.9 Hz) was identified first using an automated method implemented in Python and using the package scikit-maad. Potential bee sounds were defined as anything within the range of 370-570 Hz with a duration of 1 sec. and a threshold intensity of 0.0001 using the “find_rois_cwt” function. Second, all automated detections were manually corrected by importing label files into the audio software Audacity.