From Spacecraft to Beehives: Dan Seitz and ApisNode (402) — Beekeeping Today Podcast

What happens when a spacecraft engineer becomes fascinated with honey bees? In this episode, Jeff and Becky welcome Dan Seitz, an engineer from Los Alamos, New Mexico, whose career designing instruments for spacecraft eventually led him to tackle a very different remote-sensing challenge: understanding what is happening inside a honey bee colony.

Dan began experimenting with commercially available temperature sensors but quickly wanted more precise and frequent measurements. That curiosity evolved into ApisNode, a compact sensor system designed to sit between frames and continuously measure multiple aspects of the colony environment—including temperature, humidity, sound, vibration, and volatile compounds. The system can collect dozens of individual data metrics and transmit them from the apiary for analysis.

But collecting data is only part of Dan's idea. He is also using artificial intelligence trained with honey bee research literature to look for patterns and correlations in colony behavior. Importantly, the beekeeper remains part of the system: voice-recorded inspections provide observations that can be combined with sensor data to give the AI essential real-world context.

Dan shares a fascinating example from his own apiary, where sensors detected changes in brood temperature and colony vibration during smoke from a wildfire roughly ten miles away.

The conversation then turns to Dan's Open Apiary Project, an effort to build an anonymized, openly available database of consistently collected honey bee colony data. Could thousands of instrumented colonies eventually reveal patterns that individual inspections—and individual beekeepers—cannot see?

Also in this episode, Becky answers a HiveIQ listener question about allowing bees to build foundationless comb in Langstroth frames.

Websites from the episode and others we recommend:

ApisNode: https://www.apisnode.com
Honey Bee Health Coalition: https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org
Project Apis m. (PAm): https://www.projectapism.org
The National Honey Board: https://honey.com
Honey Bee Obscura Podcast: https://honeybeeobscura.com

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