We’re learning more about how bees do what they do, and it’s thanks to a new set of bee-friendly QR codes.
That’s a phrase I never thought I’d use.
The idea comes from Penn State University.
Entomologists typically studying bees through field work.
They watch bees in the hive or out in the world, to see where they go and what they do.
But the team on this study wanted to follow individual bees, the way that ornithologists can track individually tagged birds as they fly around.
They came up with tiny little ID markers called fiduciary tags, which they could attach to the bees’ backs without compromising their movement or their health.
They also put a sensor outside the entrance to the hive so that each bee would “scan in” or “scan out” when they entered or left.
The first thing they learned: some bees loiter.
They like to hang around the hive’s front door with other bees!
Beyond that, they learned that worker bees actually live about twice as long as we thought; it’s often more like two months instead of one.
And they learned that most trips outside the hive are pretty short, with the vast majority of trips under 20 minutes, and many of them just one to four minutes.
But about a third of the bees’ trips lasted for several hours.
The researchers think that could have been attempts to forage at times when there were fewer flowers.
Or maybe some of the bees snuck into the hive upside down, without triggering the scanner, and then gone out again.
Learning how long the bees are out could help scientists better understand how far bees travel from the hive while foraging.
Organic honey producers, for example, would want to know if their bees are traveling far from home and getting food from less organic-friendly sources.
Most of all, the researchers hope that knowing the whos, whens and wheres of the bee world will help decode the famous “waggle dance,” the movements bees make that are likely how they tell the rest of the colony how to find food sources.
Of course, they may find that what the bees are really saying is, “could somebody get this QR code off my back?!?”
Today in 1957, TIME Magazine reported on a newspaper in Ontario that had an unusual note for readers: “You may notice some typographical errors in this paper. They were put in intentionally. This paper tries to print something for everyone and some people are always looking for mistakes.”
How considerate!
Scientists Strapped QR Codes Onto Thousands of Bees to Learn How Far They Actually Fly (Gizmodo)
Miscellany, Jan. 28, 1957 (TIME)
