A group of biologists tagged hundreds of bees with QR codes To track their movements and, in doing so, they finally resolved the mystery of how far the bees travel from the hive when they are looking for nectar and pollen.
“If you took a bee out of the hive and place it 10 kilometers away, they have the ability to fly back to their homes, so they can transport very, very long distances,” Margarita López-Uibe’s Newsweek, associated teacher, told Newsweek. of entomology in the State University of Pennsylvania (States Joined) and author of the article in Hardwarx.
Until now, the scientists obtained information about where foods were looking for by observing their “wire behavior.” It is a kind of Dance that performs a bee and provides other information on where food sources are. When deciphering the wire movement, the researchers were able to obtain good estimates of the distance that these insects travel.
The research describes a digital method, developed by entomologists who work in collaboration with engineers, which does not imply long direct observations or the decoding of the bird’s movement by a team of experts.
To do this, the biologists team used APRILTAGS, a code QR smaller than a human nail that can be hit the working bee without causing harm. Every two weeks, during spring and summer, the scientists labeled 600 young bees who had just left their cells in six colonies. In total they marked more than 32,000 bees in six colmenares.
“Having these automated devices where you can label hundreds of bees at the same time and make continuous observations of bees, without stopping for weeks, will really allow you to make observations in a way that humans could not do,” he said López-Uibe.
The cameras of each hive, which worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, were connected to a microcomputer and the researchers loaded the data on their portable devices during weekly visits.
Technology could be applied to other insects, the researchers said, or to determine what could be a good place to build a bee hive.
“If we have areas with a lot of contamination, we may not want to have bees nearby. I think understanding this potential ability to estimate food distances could have a great impact. ”
He added: “One of the most interesting aspects of the research is that it was possible thanks to the collaboration between engineers and entomologists. They contributed all their technical knowledge and their scientific approach oriented to problem solving. They really helped us address biological issues in a very different way. ” N
(Published in cooperation with Newsweek. Published in Cooperation with Newsweek)
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(Tagstotranslate) Bees
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