FAIRHiveFrames-1K: A Public FAIR Dataset of 1265 Annotated Hive Frame Images with Preliminary YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 Baselines

In precision apiculture, the portable digital camera is a cost-effective sensor for capturing hive images or videos used to quantify different colony variables. Openly accessible, well-annotated, interoperable cell-level image datasets are still the exception rather than the norm. This shortage constitutes a major barrier to AI-driven approaches aimed at automating image-based comb analysis. In this article, we present FAIRHiveFrames-1K, a publicly available dataset of 1265 annotated hive frame images (1920 × 1080 PNG) designed to facilitate research in AI-intensive image-based comb analysis automation. The dataset, derived from a 2013-2022 U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service multi-sensor research reservoir, includes 124,669 annotated regions of interest for seven biologically meaningful categories consistent with comb analysis literature and standard hive inspection protocols. FAIRHiveFrames-1K is curated according to FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and distributed under CC-BY 4.0 with standard annotation formats, fixed training and validation splits, and reproducible benchmarking artifacts. To establish preliminary baseline performance, we iteratively tuned four YOLO architectures (YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s, YOLOv11n, YOLOv11s) under a shared tuning protocol over the period of dataset growth.