What is "R"?
How fancy are your coding skills?

I have several ideas I would like to do with bees. One of which is "Facial Recognition".
If you could track individual bees going in and out of the hive I'm sure you could get some interesting and useful data from that.
From my observation the bees do look different from one another. But I'm not sure if it's enough to differentiate between them.
Just counting how many bees went into -vs- out of the hive would tell you allot. And it would be easy to track the ones carrying pollen. Maybe even identify the pollen based on color.