<story><title>Computer simulation helps test land management techniques to help bumblebees</title><url>https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_872443_en.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>throw149102</author><text>I spent a few minutes looking at this &amp;quot;BEE-Steward&amp;quot; and it&amp;#x27;s corresponding models, BEEHAVE and BEESCOUT, and the underlying NetLogo language that is used to model these things.&lt;p&gt;I guess I immediately have a few questions - How do we know that the model corresponds to reality at all? I mean, I know we have experiments to confirm what impacts the bees, but it seems like there could be a massive amount of variety depending on different factors. I&amp;#x27;d love to see some research showing that BEE-Steward can work in real scenarios. Right now, they just have a simulation showing &amp;quot;hey, if we change x and y we can get 5x more bees&amp;quot;, but does that actually correspond to reality?&lt;p&gt;Secondly, how do we make farmers actually &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to use this? Do they get paid for taking care of bees on their land? I know this is just a policy question, but it&amp;#x27;s still important to answer. Do farmers need any training to use this? Can we collect data in an automated fashion to reduce the work the farmers have to do? This almost sounds like a deep learning problem - use a camera to map + classify areas of farmland, how many pollinators they have, the presence of bees, etc.&lt;p&gt;Finally, what is the fundamental problem of bee modeling? Is it fundamentally a computational problem (where we know the rules, but computing the model can be hard) or is it a data problem (where we know how to compute how the bees will behave, we can do it efficiently, but coming up with rules that bees actually follow is hard)? I&amp;#x27;ve noted that the NetLogo environment by default will only take up 1GB of RAM, which is already not very much considering the JVM itself will take a pretty big chunk to run just about anything.&lt;p&gt;It would be interesting to start building some sort of &amp;quot;National bee model&amp;quot;, rather than just working farmland by farmland. Is there any project like this in the works?&lt;p&gt;Either way, I&amp;#x27;m sure all of my questions and more are already being asked&amp;#x2F;answered by people much more involved with the conservationist field. Just my 2 cents.</text></comment>
<story><title>Computer simulation helps test land management techniques to help bumblebees</title><url>https://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_872443_en.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcdonje</author><text>Cool project. Confusing headline. They made models to help research land management strategies that would be potentially helpful for bees.</text></comment>