Portable digital video surveillance system for monitoring flower-visiting bumblebees

In this study we used a portable event-triggered video surveillance system for monitoring flower-visiting bumblebees. The system consist of mini digital recorder (mini-DVR) with a video motion detection (VMD) sensor which detects changes in the image captured by the camera, the intruder triggers the recording immediately. The sensitivity and the detection area are adjustable, which may prevent unwanted recordings. To our best knowledge this is the first study using VMD sensor to monitor flower-visiting insects. Observation of flower-visiting insects has traditionally been monitored by direct observations, which is time demanding, or by continuous video monitoring, which demands a great effort in reviewing the material. A total of 98.5 monitoring hours were conducted. For the mini-DVR with VMD, a total of 35 min were spent reviewing the recordings to locate 75 pollinators, which means ca. 0.35 sec reviewing per monitoring hr. Most pollinators in the order Hymenoptera were identified to species or group level, some were only classified to family (Apidae) or genus (Bombus). The use of the video monitoring system described in the present paper could result in a more efficient data sampling and reveal new knowledge to pollination ecology (e.g. species identification and pollinating behaviour).