The study focused on a method of detection for bee colony infestation with the Varroa destructor mite, based on the measurements of the chemical properties of beehive air. The efficient detection of varroosis was demonstrated. This method of detection is based on a semiconductor gas sensor array and classification module. The efficiency of detection was characterized by the true positive rate (TPR) and true negative rate (TNR). Several factors influencing the performance of the method were determined. They were: (1) the number and kind of sensors, (2) the classifier, (3) the group of bee colonies, and (4) the balance of the classification data set. Gas sensor array outperformed single sensors. It should include at least four sensors. Better results of detection were attained with a support vector machine (SVM) as compared with the k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm. The selection of bee colonies was important. TPR and TNR differed by several percent for the two examined groups of colonies. The balance of the classification data was crucial. The average classification results were, for the balanced data set: TPR = 0.93 and TNR = 0.95, and for the imbalanced data set: TP = 0.95 and FP = 0.53. The selection of bee colonies and the balance of classification data set have to be controlled in order to attain high performance of the proposed detection method.
Keywords: Varroa destructor; classification; gas sensor; honey bee.