Scientists have attached QR codes to thousands of bees to find out how far they actually fly

We say hard workers are “busy as a bee,” but in a recent study, honey bees looked more like employees in an office building.

Entomologists and engineers in the US have created tiny QR codes that have caused tens of thousands of honeybees to appear in rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York. The unprecedented application of this technology, as detailed in A paper Published in November in the magazine DevicesIt will help scientists and beekeepers study how far insects travel to collect food. Excitingly, the experiment has already shed new light on the behaviors of this mysterious pollinator.

Previous studies suggest that honeybees can attach up to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) from their hives, but entomologists assume this rarely happens. The goal is to understand whether this 10 km estimate is biologically accurate. Can we determine exactly how far honeybees travel from their hives? “Margarita López Arribe, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and co-author of the study, at the University of statement.

QR codes, called credit tags, basically work like badges in an office building. The team developed an automatic imaging system with a sensor at the hive entrance to record every time tagged bees enter or exit, allowing entomologists to track individual foraging times. The sensor records individual bee ID, date, time, temperature, and whether bees are entering or exiting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMST1S0OZFG

Fieldwork in traditional entomology is usually less hands-on, but this approach provides an unprecedented look at honeybee behavior.

“This technology opens up opportunities for biologists to study systems in ways that were not possible before, especially with regard to organic beekeeping,” Lopez-Arribe said. Organic beekeeping involves, among other things, maintaining a sufficient area of ​​industrial areas to prevent bees from collecting pollen in polluted areas. However, because common bee foraging distances remain elusive, USDA recommendations for organic certification may be inaccurate in this regard.

“In field biology, we usually look at things with our eyes, but the number of observations we can make as humans will never scale to what a machine can do,” she added. In total, the team tagged more than 32,000 bees across six tools with QR codes smaller than a human pinky fingernail that do not harm the bees or restrict their movement.

“We targeted young bees so that we could more accurately track their age, especially when they start flying and when they stop,” said Robin Underwood from Penn State, who also participated in the study. Younger individuals are easier to handle because they do not give birth yet.

So, what gets to the bees?

The researchers noted that most trips from the hive usually lasted between one and four minutes — periods of potty breaks or a quick check — and some longer trips were still less than 20 minutes. However, 34% of tagged bees ventured from the hive for more than two hours.

This longer absence could be due to longer foraging trips. Some longer flights, for example, correspond to time periods with fewer flowers, during which bees are likely to travel to collect their dues. However, the scientists also admitted that the data could have been skewed by bees that simply did not return or entered the hive upside down, effectively hiding the QR code from the sensor.

In addition, “we also found that bees attach for a much longer period of time over their lifespan than initially thought,” Underwood said. She explained that entomologists had previously suggested that honey bees lived for about 28 days. However, “we see bees hanging for about six weeks, and they don’t start foraging until they’re about two weeks old, so they live longer than we thought.”

When they begin to forage, bees within the same hive share information about food sources with each other through what is called a “Dance Dance.” Now, the team is working with researchers from Virginia Tech to align foraging time data with this behavior to further investigate how far bees travel from the hive.

Maybe the next step is to tape little flyers to their backs.