Scientists can already follow the bees: they put them codes

New method allowed to discover movements and cycles of the life of these animals. And after all, they can live more than one thought.

Scientists at Penn State University use QR codes installed in the back of the bees to follow their trail.

The process “required a lot of practice” to be done well, since “if we do not add enough glue, the bees can remove the label, but if we add extra glue, it can spread glue all over the body of the bees,” he explains to the main author of the published in Hardwarex in December, Margarita López-Uibe.

And the findings were revealing: instead of spending a few minutes of the hives, there are bees that pass up to two hours seeking food or just “just explore.” And there are some who never return home.

Another novelty is longevity, much larger than expected. “We are seeing bees looking for food for six weeks, and they only start looking for food when they are about two weeks old, so They live much longer than we thought“, Said the co -author Robyn Underwood

“One of the objectives of the development of this free access system and with low cost equipment was to be able to transfer this method to be replicated to dozens (or hundreds) of landscapes,” the authors also explain.

And the goal is to prove a point: “If the hives are placed in areas with high quality foods in sufficient quantity, the bees will tend to Find food near the colonieswhich means beekeepers can ‘limit’ the area of ​​bee food. ”

The ultimate purpose of the study is to use these data to reinforce the rules of biological beekeep in the United States.