BumbleBox Workshop, BOMBUSS 3.0

Instructions and materials for bumblebee in-nest tracking workshop, BOMBUSS 3.0 (EcoSur, Chiapas Mexico, November 2023)

The goal of this workshop is for participants to get hands-on experience with automated tracking of individual bumblebees, behavioral quantification, and analysis using the BumbleBox system. For the workshop, Bumbleboxes with software installed will be provided, but instructions for building BumbleBox setups below. By the end of the workshop, the goal is for participants to generate and analyze their own tracking data using Bombus ephippiatus.

Set up, installation, and preparation

Hardware and build (prepared ahead of time)

BumbleBox software available at the BumbleBox GitHub

Laptop/PC - for offline analysis, with RStudio installed

Workshop plan

Outline (~3 hours total):

1. Introduction, system overview and BumbleBox hardware setup (~45 mins)
2. Software configuration and data collection (~1 hr, instructions here)
3. Example data analysis (~45 mins, R Markdown here in the 'code' folder of this repository)
4. Custom data analysis (~30 mins)
5. (Optional) brood mapping demo and spatial analysis¹

Footnotes

1. For this, you will need a computer set up with labelme installed ↩