For nearly 100 years, electronic bee counters have been developed using various technologies to track the foraging activity of mostly honey bee colonies. These counters should enable remote monitoring of the hives without disturbing natural flight behaviour while generating precise scientific data. However, there are few counters on the market that are able to fulfil this task. One main challenge is the lack of standardised methods to validate a counter's precision, as validation is crucial to categorise and judge the data produced by the counter, especially for scientific purposes. Another challenge is the interpretation of flight data to measure the effects of environmental or anthropogenic sources. Nevertheless, recent developments in the field are promising. This review describes the historic development of automated bee flight measurements and critically compares validation methods to encourage their improvement. To increase the comparability of future analyses of bee counters, current advances in data interpretation are also presented.

中文翻译：

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自动蜜蜂计数设备的方法、挑战和最新进展：综述

近 100 年来，人们使用各种技术开发了电子蜜蜂计数器，以跟踪大部分蜜蜂群的觅食活动。这些计数器应该能够在不干扰自然飞行行为的情况下远程监控蜂巢，同时生成精确的科学数据。然而，市场上很少有专柜能够完成这项任务。一个主要挑战是缺乏验证计数器精度的标准化方法，因为验证对于分类和判断计数器产生的数据至关重要，尤其是出于科学目的。另一个挑战是解释飞行数据以测量环境或人为来源的影响。然而，该领域的最新发展是有希望的。这篇评论描述了自动蜜蜂飞行测量的历史发展，并批判性地比较了验证方法以鼓励它们的改进。为了提高蜜蜂计数器未来分析的可比性，还介绍了数据解释的当前进展。