We say difficult workers are “busy as a bee”, but in a recent study, honeybees seemed more like employees in an office building.
Entomologists and engineers in the United States glued small QR codes to the back of tens of thousands of honey bees in rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York. The unprecedented application of this technology, as in detail in a paper published in November in the magazine HardwareWill help scientists and beekeepers study how long the insects travel to collect food. Excitely, the experiment has already poured a new light on the mysterious behaviors of this decisive pollinator.
Previous studies indicate that honey bees can eat up to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) from their hives, but entomologists hypothesize that this rarely happens. “The goal is to understand if this 10-kilometer assessment is biologically accurate. Can we accurately determine how far the honey bees from their hives?” Margarita López-Uribe, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and co-author of the study, said in university statement.
The QR codes, called trust tags, essentially serve as badges in an office building. The team has developed an automatic imaging system with a sensor at the bee entrance to record each time a labeled Bee enters or exits, allowing the entomologists to track their individual fodder times. The sensor records the individual bee identification, date, hour, temperature, and whether the bee comes in or exits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMST1S0OZFG
Traditional entomological field work is usually less practical, but this approach provides unprecedented knowledge of honeybee behavior.
“This technology opens up opportunities to biologists to study systems in ways that have not been possible, especially with regard to organic beekeeping,” said López-Uribe. Organic beekeeping includes, among other things, to keep enough space from industrial regions to prevent bees from collecting pollen in contaminated areas. However, as the frequent Abel fugitive distances remain transient, the recommendations of the US Department of Agriculture on Organic Certification could be vague in this regard.
“In field biology, we usually just look at things with our eyes, but the number of observations we can do as humans will never increase to what a machine can do,” she added. In total, the team labeled over 32,000 bees through six APIs with QR codes smaller than human pink nails that do not damage the bees or limit their movement.
“We aimed young bees so that we can track their age more precisely, especially when they start flying and when they stop,” said Penn State’s Robyn Underwood, who also participated in the study. Younger individuals are easier to manipulate because they are still not pricked.
So what do bees do?
The researchers observed that most travel from the hive usually lasted between one and four minutes – maybe breaks or fast weather control – and some longer trips were still less than 20 minutes. However, 34% of the labeled bees ventured out of the hive for more than two hours.
This longer absence could be due to longer fodder excursions. Some longer trips, for example, corresponded to time periods with fewer flowers, during which bees probably had to travel further to collect their debt. However, the scientists also accepted that the data could be deformed by bees that simply never returned or entered the hive upstream, effectively hiding the QR code of the sensor.
Additionally, “we also found that bees eat much longer during their lifetimes than initially thought,” Underwood said. Entomologists have previously suggested that honey bees lived about 28 days, she explained. However, “We see bees eat for six weeks, and they don’t start eating until they are about two weeks now, so they live much longer than we thought.”
When they start eating, bees within the same hive shares information about food sources with the so -called “swing dance”. Now, the team is working with Virginia Tech researchers to reconcile their fodder time data with this behavior to continue to explore how far bees travel from their hive.
Maybe the next step will be glued to tiny airtags to their backs.
