Quote Originally Posted by Deamiter View Post
Man, if giving internet access to bee hives gets popular, Pinterest is going to EXPLODE!

More seriously, you should note that while red light will bother the bees less, you probably want to be careful about how much red light you use. Especially if you keep it on continuously, you may be adding a significant heat source if you use enough light to get good images out of cell phone cameras.

Since you're already using computer control, the easiest solution may be to simply turn the light on only while the camera is taking a picture. Otherwise, just do some experiments with thermometers to see how much heat you're adding before you install the bees.
I've bought some car-tuning 12V red lights to "pimp my hive". LEDs don't give out much heat so I should be fine on that front. I've still considered turning the light on and off anyway to reduce power consumption and to reduce any tendency for the bees to block the glass if any part of the light is still in spectrum that they can see.

For that second issue the downside of using the android phones is that I can't easily remove the IR filters from the cameras and use IR LEDs instead, which should be safely outside the range the bees can see. Does anyone know if the bees are completely blind to a common red LED or just mostly blind?

Pedro