Little bees carry RFID trackers on their backs: to monitor their behavior
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At the Kew Gardens in London, a group of ecologists are testing a tracker designed to monitor bee behavior. Its designer, Dr Mark O’Neill, said the tracker was built using existing technology, a prototype of a device used to monitor warehouse pallets.
The reader reads the signal from the kit and connects to the Raspberry Pi computer, which records the read data.
This unit has an acceptance range of up to 2.5m, compared to less than 0.01m of the previously used model.The tracker contains a standardRFID(Radio Frequency Identification) chip and specially designed antenna. Dr. O’Neill designed the antenna to be thinner and lighter than those used in other trackers used to track small insects, allowing him to improve the reception range.
The engineer (referring to Dr O’Neill), technical director at Newcastle-based technology company Tumbling Dice, is currently trying to patent the invention.
“The first stage is to do very early product mockups using components that I can easily buy,” he said.
“I need to optimize the components of the antenna so that the whole tracker is much smaller”
“I’ve done about 50 or so so far, all welded on top of my desk – it feels like surgery.”
The average time worker bees collect is around 20 minutes, which means they have a range of about 1 kilometer (0.9 miles), Dr O’Neill explained.
The idea is to spread the readers around the hives and flower buds so we can track the signal as the bees roam freely in the wild.
The tiny tracker, just 8mm (0.3in) high and 4.8mm (1.9in) wide, takes just 5 to 10 minutes to attach to the bee with superglue. The bees were given a cold treatment before to make them more docile.
“They make an unbearable noise,” admitted Dr O’Neill.
He told the BBC he hoped the tracker, which is less than a single bee, would remain attached to the bee for three months, fixed to the bee’s centre of gravity so as not to interfere with their flight. Three months is the life expectancy of a bee.
They are only mounted on worker bees, which does not affect the mating of bees.
“If an animal eats a bee with a tracker, my guess is that the tracker stays in its stomach,” Dr. O’Neill said.
“But the attrition rate of bees working in the field is very low, they are very capable, they are good at getting out of trouble, and most of them die of old age.”
Dr Sarah Barlow, a restoration ecologist from the Kew Gardens, was involved in testing the as-yet unnamed tracker.
“These trackers are a huge advance in radio technology, and no one has had the right medium to track small flying insects over long distances,” she said.
“This new technology makes it possible for scientists to track the behavior of bees across the continent.
“Being able to track the behavior of bees is very important for us to understand why bees are struggling right now and how we can reverse the trend of declining bees.”
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