Raw high-resolution video recordings of honey bees (Apis mellifera) at artificial feeder stations, collected for the Arecibo C3 (AC3) Center citizen-science and behavioral-ecology project in Puerto Rico. The videos are packaged in WebDataset (.tar) shards and split into three configurations, one per published school feeder site: American-Military-Academy, Monserrate-León-de-Irizarry, and Pedro-Falú.

This collection is a companion to the AC3 collected foraging-log dataset published as "Bee Hunting" datasets on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.20736946).

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

The AC3 project tracks honey-bee foraging behavior at artificial feeders at partner schools in Puerto Rico. At each feeder, foragers are individually marked with number tags or paint dots and recorded with overhead video cameras as they arrive at and depart from the feeder entrance ramp. These raw videos support studies of foraging dynamics (bee-lining / "bee hunting", arrival–departure timing, navigation) as well as computer-vision research on detection, tracking, and fine-grained re-identification of individual insects.

Curated by: The AC3 team and Megret Lab — University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, in partnership with participating schools (Escuela Pedro Falú Orellano - Río Grande, American Military Academy - Guaynabo, Monserrate-León-de-Irizarry - Cabo Rojo).
Funded by: U.S. National Science Foundation, Arecibo C3 (AC3) Center, awards #2321759, #2321760, and #2321761 (project lead Dr. José L. Agosto Rivera). Camera setups and edge video work was supported by NSF #2318597 (CyIndiBee).
Shared by: megretlab on the Hugging Face Hub.
Language(s): English (eng) for all metadata and documentation.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Dataset Sources

Repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/megretlab/AC3_BeeVids
Foraging-log companion (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20736946

Uses

Direct Use

Honey-bee detection and multi-object tracking in top-down feeder video.
Fine-grained re-identification of individual bees from paint-mark and natural appearance cues (the primary motivation for red_bee_reID).
Behavioral-ecology analysis of foraging: arrival/departure timing, feeder visitation rates, and bee-lining/"bee hunting" studies.
A raw-video benchmark for developing video processing, cropping, masking, and keypoint pipelines.

Out-of-Scope Use

The CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license prohibits commercial use and redistribution of modified/derivative versions of the videos. Derived works (crops, annotations, models) should be released separately under their own terms — see the derived dataset for an example.
The data is from a single region (Puerto Rico), a small number of days, and three sites, so it is not intended as a representative sample of honey-bee behavior across populations, seasons, or geographies.

Dataset Structure

The dataset is organized into three configurations, one per feeder site, each backed by one or more WebDataset .tar shards:

American-Military-Academy/*.tar
Monserrate-León-de-Irizarry/*.tar
Pedro-Falú/*.tar

Data Instances

Each WebDataset shard is a .tar archive of samples. A sample corresponds to a video recording (or a clip thereof) keyed by a unique sample id, with the encoded video stream stored as the primary member and any associated metadata stored as a sidecar member sharing the same key. Loading is supported through the WebDataset API or the Hugging Face datasets viewer.

Data Fields

Inside the .tar webformat files are:

.mp4 H.265/HEVC-encoded recording at 3840×2160 px, 17 fps (see Data Collection).
.json contains metadata of unique identifier per recording within a site.

Inside the Metadata.csv file:

path: path to encoded mp4
site_code: numeric identifier for location of data capture
date: date of video collection
vid_name: original saved name of .mp4 video
cam: camera used for recording either ("arducam" or "baslercam")
start_time: time of start of video recording
file_name: name of .mp4 in tar sharded video

Data Splits

Splits are organized by recording site (the three configs above) rather than by train/validation/test. Per-site shard counts and total video duration: [More Information Needed].

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

The videos were collected to study honey-bee foraging behavior at artificial feeders within the AC3 project and to provide raw material for computer-vision research on individual-bee tracking and re-identification. Marking foragers and filming them at the feeder entrance enables both behavioral quantification and the construction of identity-labeled image datasets.

Source Data

Data Collection and Processing

Recordings follow a shared AC3 protocol across the three feeder sites:

Setup: an overhead machine-vision camera films the entrance ramp of an artificial bee feeder. The entrance ramp is approx 8cm in width and 15cm in length with blue plastic background and covered in non-reflective glass
Camera: Arducam IMX283 USB 3.0 Camera 3840x2160 resolution. H.265/HEVC video at 20fps.
Marking: as many foragers as possible marked with circular number tags containing 2 digits between 0 and 99. Variable number of total tags were placed according to data collection site. Tags are either black text on white, yellow background, or white text on reg, green or blue background.
Coverage: Data was collected in the morning (approx 9am ~ 1pm) at each site over 3 days.
Packaging: raw recordings are organized per site and serialized into WebDataset .tar shards for distribution.

Downstream, these videos were processed into the red_bee_reID dataset by extracting per-bee crops (≈1.5× the average bee-skeleton length). Further data products analyzing bee behavior and resulting datasets will be linked upon creation.

Who are the source data producers?

The AC3 team at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and partner schools, including (from the companion Zenodo record) Lizbeth Alvarado Vargas, Ariana I. Rodríguez Flores, Luis Aparicio Mestra, Jesús Castro González, Jaime W. Abreu Ramos, Andrea Ortiz Cana, Amilcar Velez Flores, Jairo A. Ayala-Godoy, Tugrul Giray, and project leader José L. Agosto Rivera. Video collection was carried out by Luke Meyers, Josué A. Rodríguez-Cordero, and Rémi Mégret.

Annotations

This release contains raw video without per-frame labels.

Annotation process

Not applicable to this raw-video release. See red_bee_reID for the downstream annotation process for using this raw data (manual identity assignment, automated tracking, keypoint estimation).

Who are the annotators?

Not applicable to this release; see the derived dataset.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The subjects are insects (honey bees); the dataset contains no personally identifiable human information. Recordings are framed on the feeder ramp; any incidental appearance of people (e.g., a hand placing marks) is minimal. If reviewers identify any incidental human imagery, it should be reported to the maintainers.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

Limited scope: three feeder sites in a single region (Puerto Rico) over a small number of days; not representative of honey-bee behavior across populations, seasons, or environments.
Sampling bias: only foragers that could be caught and paint-marked are individually identifiable, and marking favors active, frequently visiting bees.
Environmental variation: lighting, weather, and feeder traffic vary across sites and sessions.
License constraints: the NoDerivatives clause limits remixing/redistribution of altered videos.

Recommendations

Users should treat results as site- and season-specific, report which configuration(s) were used, and release any derived annotations or models under separately stated licenses. Cross-site generalization should be validated explicitly.

Licensing Information

Released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives). Note that the derived re-identification dataset red_bee_reID is released under CC BY-NC 4.0; check each resource's terms before use.

Citation

Please cite the companion AC3 foraging-records dataset where relevant: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20736946.

Acknowledgements

This collection was possible through NSF award #2321760 under Dr. J. Agosto Rivera, with the Arecibo C3 (AC3) Center (NSF #2321759, #2321760, #2321761).This work was supported by NSF award #2318597 (CyIndiBee) for camera equipment and recording work.

Dataset Card Authors

Luke Meyers.

Dataset Card Contact

Via the megretlab organization on the Hugging Face Hub. For the companion foraging dataset, the Zenodo contact is Lizbeth Alvarado Vargas.

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