Several hundred bees in rural Pennsylvania and rural New York are sporting tiny QR codes on their backs. More than the latest in apiarian fashion, the little tags serve a scientific purpose: tracking when bees go in and out of their hives to better understand how long honey bees spend foraging for food outside of their hives. The work, a collaboration among entomologists and electrical engineers at Penn State, is the first step in solving a long-standing mystery of how far bees travel from their hives to collect pollen and nectar.
So far, the researchers have learned that while most trips outside of the hive last mere minutes, a small minority of bees can spend more than two hours away. The team said they expect to learn much more, thanks to the system they developed to track honey bees' time out of the hive.
"This technology is opening up opportunities for biologists to study systems in ways that weren't previously possible, especially in relation to organic beekeeping," said Margarita López-Uribe, the Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor, associate professor of entomology and author on the paper published in HardwareX, an open-access journal that details the exact equipment and methods researchers use in their work so that it might be replicated or built upon by others. "In field biology, we usually just look at things with our eyes, but the number of observations we can make as humans will never scale up to what a machine can do."
Like workers at a high-security building, the bees "buzz" their way in and out of the hive, flashing the pass on their back. They have free access, but they are digitally tracked via an automated imaging system the team developed to monitor when bees leave the hive and when they return via a customized entrance with a camera sensor. The QR codes glued to bees' backs are known as fiduciary tags, which carry the smallest amount of identification information and can be quickly detected and logged via the imaging system, even in low-resolution conditions. The system is a break with conventional entomology field work in which researchers visually observe bees for limited periods, enabling far more comprehensive and expanded observations, the researchers said.
