Скачать или смотреть Bees sporting tiny QR codes reveal hive secrets

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. They published the details of the tracking system in Hardware X.

Collaborators on the team at Penn State include Margarita López-Uribe, the Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor, associate professor of entomology; Julio Urbina, professor of electrical engineering; Diego Penaloza-Aponte, a doctoral student in electrical engineering; Robyn Underwood, Penn State Extension educator in apiculture; Sarabeth Brandt, doctoral student in electrical engineering; and Selina Bruckner, postdoctoral scholar in entomology. Other collaborators include Erin Dent, an undergraduate student at Texas A&M University who participated on the project as a Project Drawdown scholar in summer of 2023; Benedict DeMoras, with the Department of Entomology at Cornell University; Margaret Couvillon and Lindsay Johnson, with the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech; and Scott McArt, with the Department of Entomology at Cornell University.