Pollination is crucial for sustaining Australia's unique ecosystems and agriculture, enabling the reproduction of many native plants and crops. However, our pollinators face a number of threats. The recent detection of Varroa mite (Varroa destructor) has particularly raised concerns for the health of honey bees (Apis mellifera) and pollination services.
Because we love Australian native bees (Tetragonula carbonaria) and deploy bee hive homes for them, we built a low-cost camera trap and developed AI to identify native bees (Tetragonula carbonaria), to check their health, relative abundance and behaviour.
Similar camera trap systems can be developed for targeting other insect species, particularly of the order Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), which can provide an efficient way to deploy monitoring over large areas – through a network of low-cost camera traps with efficient AI processing to scan for target species.
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