RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Markerless tracking of an entire insect colony
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.03.26.007302
DO 10.1101/2020.03.26.007302
A1 Katarzyna Bozek
A1 Laetitia Hebert
A1 Yoann Portugal
A1 Greg J. Stephens
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/27/2020.03.26.007302.abstract
AB We present a comprehensive, computational method for tracking an entire colony of the honey bee Apis mellifera using high-resolution video on a natural honeycomb background. We adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) segmentation architecture to automatically identify bee and brood cell positions, body orientations and within-cell states. We achieve high accuracy (~10% body width error in position, ~10° error in orientation, and true positive rate > 90%) and demonstrate months-long monitoring of sociometric colony fluctuations. We combine extracted positions with rich visual features of organism-centered images to track individuals over time and through challenging occluding events, recovering ~79% of bee trajectories from five observation hives over a span of 5 minutes. The resulting trajectories reveal important behaviors, including fast motion, comb-cell activity, and waggle dances. Our results provide new opportunities for the quantitative study of collective bee behavior and for advancing tracking techniques of crowded systems.