Data from: Anticipating honeybee winter mortality by tracking their social thermoregulation

This dataset result from an experiment with a robotic honeycomb system under real-world field conditions in commercial hives and measured thermoregulation throughout the three-dimensional (3D) colony structure of honey bees (Apis mellifera). We used a total of 36 temperature sensors, evenly distributed over three frames, installed at positions 3, 5 and 7 within the 10-frame hive. Instead of using printed circuit boards, we fixed the sensors between two layers of wax to facilitate their acceptance by the bees. We equipped four colonies in France with this adapted robotic honeycomb system during the winter of 2022-2023, along with a temperature sensor outside each hive to measure Text, ranging from -18.6°C to 25.7°C. Temperature data were collected every 15 minutes and then averaged per hour. We calculated Tamb, Tcore and Tcen following Barmack et al. (2023) method from a total of 2,010,358 raw in-nest temperature data recorded in the four hives over the winter. We found that a 3D-adapted robotic honeycomb system is needed to capture key metrics of social thermoregulation in honeybees under field conditions. Moreover, based on post-winter assessment of the colonies, we investigated whether social thermoregulation differed between surviving and collapsing colonies over the winter. Interestingly, we found four potential early warning signals of colony health and winter mortality. We conclude that the development of 3D monitoring of honey bee in-nest temperature could help beekeepers to assess colony survival chances in order to reduce winter colony mortality.The data are related to the scientific paper "Requier, F., et al. (under review) Anticipating honeybee winter mortality by tracking their social thermoregulation. Science Robotics".Data are available as four csv files titled "hiveF261_collapsingColony1.csv" (67,500 obs.) and "hiveF262_collapsingColony2.csv" (70,687 obs.) for the two examples of collapsing colonies, and "hiveF279_survivingColony1.csv" (73,807 obs.) and "hiveF280_survivingColony2.csv" (73,880 obs.) for the two examples of surviving colonies. Data represent the average temperatures per hour per day.# METADATA#'data.frame': 5 variables:# $ timestamp : Factor variable ; the date of the data in the format YYYY-MM-DD and the time in hours (from 01 for 1am to 23 for 11pm)# $ Tcore : Numeric variable; the core temperature of the whole bee cluster in °C# $ Tcen : Numeric variable; the temperature of the centroid of the bee cluster in °C# $ Tamb : Numeric variable; the average ambient temperature outside the bee cluster in °C# $ Text : Numeric variable; the external temperature in °C