Penn State Scientists Track Honeybee Foraging Habits With QR Codes
Penn State scientists have devised a creative way to learn the secrets to honeybees’ hives.
Scientists attached AprilTags, tiny QR codes smaller than a pinky fingernail, to the backs of young bees to investigate their foraging habits. Robyn Allwood, a Penn State Extension educator, said more than 32,000 bees have been tagged so far.
In a research paper describing the project, a team of biologists, engineers, and entomologists shared how they created a system to gather data from the honeybees at six hive locations in New York and Pennsylvania.
As the bees make their way in and out of the hive, cameras containing sensors spot the bees’ QR codes. The technology helps the researchers identify individual bees and track the length and number of trips the bees make to and from their hives.
“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 at Penn State, associate professor of entomology, and author on the paper. “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.”
Through their study, researchers have learned that most of the bees’ trips are short, while other bees were out of the hives for over two hours.
Researchers said that the monitoring system could promote more expanded knowledge on the subject of organic beekeeping. Beekeepers and scientists alike are buzzing over the promise of what continued research data on the subject could yield. Through a collaboration with a team at Virginia Tech, researchers at Penn State also hope to investigate how the duration time for foraging matches decoded bees’ “waggle dances.”