Acoustic and vibration monitoring of honeybee colonies for beekeeping-relevant aspects of presence of queen bee and swarming

•Acoustic data can help us determine queen presence and swarming status in honeybees.•Lack of common evaluation metric is preventing comparisons between studies.•Development of automated features engineering can improve future research. Honeybees are social insects that use a range of signals and cues to communicate with one another. While many of these communications have been identified and studied, the use of acoustic and vibration recordings to automatically monitor colony behaviour and health is yet an upcoming field of research. Two indicators that are important for beekeepers to assess colony state are queen presence and swarming preparation, as their absence and presence, respectively, can lead to colony collapse and honey harvest loss. Microphones and accelerometers have been used to record hives that are showing those indicators and resulting data was used to analyse and classify different colony states. Although some studies have been quite successful in using data resulting from such recordings to detect queen presence and swarming, there are also many challenges and limitations; small sample sizes, the need for a standardised feature engineering approach and more robust models in terms of generalisability being just some of them. This review aims to give an overview of studies using acoustic and vibration recordings to determine queen presence and indicators of swarming, by presenting common methods and analyses and discussing challenges, as well as their limitations and future areas of improvement, to increase their use in precision beekeeping.