How best to count bees entering and leaving a hive to measure hive activity?

Question

This is my first question here, so I apologize for all mistakes I could have possibly made. I'm a high school student in East-Central Europe and I need to complete some research for a biology contest (asking for advice is accepted, so I'm not cheating). My task is to analyze the influence of certain environmental factors (temperature etc., it's not that important for my question) on the activity of bees. The method is pretty simple: once a week I record the entrance to the bee hive (I do it on four hives), play it in slow-mo (It's impossible to count them properly without doing so) and simply count the number of bees entering or leaving. Problem is, I don't know how long the observation should take. I play it in like X1/8, you need to play it twice (entering/leaving), so it takes a lot of time to gather one piece of information for a certain day. Till now I've been doing it for one minute - and there seems to be some kind of pattern to their activity analyzed that way. Yet, I'm not sure if it's actually eligible. I can't do the observation for hours - I still need to learn and have other duties. So, what should I do? Could anyone give me some advice? Is one minute (several, like 6 times a day per hive) legitimate enough? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I'm not an expert on bees, but in a situation like this I think statistics is more at play than biology. Any arbitrary length of time for the observations will do (one minute, five minutes, etc). More important is that you randomly select different times of day to perform the observations. Randomly choosing observation times is advised since the entry/exit behavior of the bees may vary during the course of a day. Another option is to systematically observe at regular intervals, such as making a one minute observation every hour on the hour. Having more samples obviously helps as well. After gathering a good number of samples, you can average them together, then rescale to the desired unit of time. As to the accuracy of your estimate, that depends on the number observations and on the statistical distribution of bee entries/exits per minute. For instance, if you assume the number of entries/exits per minute is normally distributed, you can get an interval estimate for the mean of the distribution using a t-interval, which would take into account the number of observations, the average entry/exit count per observation, and the standard deviation of the counts.