Imagining the IoT Honeybee Panopticon (from “The Otterbiography”)
Many times in my life, I have been far ahead of the curve. For example, in 1982, I strove to create a surveillance system for honeybee colonies, decades before practicable.
My second lab rotation that spring was with a star-student of E.O. Wilson, Dr. Thomas Seeley, who was studying the economics and physiology of honeybee colonies.
Tom was the paragon of the meticulous-naturalist tradition of Karl von Frisch, living at the hive and in the fields with the honeybees. His motto seemed to be, “To know the bee, you must become the bee.”
He was also one of the most soft-spoken people I have ever met. Even in the cavernous lecture hall of Osoborn Memorial Labs, seating perhaps 250, he spoke with a gentle hum that I fondly thought of as reminiscent of a contented honeybee buzzing quietly on a sun warmed blosson.
At the time, I had a gig at the Yale Computer Center (YCC) as a consultant, helping grad students and faculty in all disciplines at Yale to incorporate computation and statistical tools into their projects, and the still-new Internet into their workflow at a time when there were perhaps fewer than several hundred thousand Internet users, globally.
In March 1982, while walking to YCC, I noticed pollinators swarming the cherry trees…
