Honeybees fitted with tiny QR codes are helping researchers track how long they spend foraging outside their hives.
Entomologists and electrical engineers at Penn State University in the US are collaborating to track the foraging habits of thousands of bees.
The aim is to discover exactly how far bees will travel from their hives to collect pollen and nectar.
All worker honeybees are female. Each bee involved in the study had a QR code, or fiduciary tag, glued to her back. These codes are tiny as they only carry the smallest amount of identification information, and do not impede movement or cause harm. The team tagged over 32,000 bees across six hives in six different apiaries in rural New York and Pennsylvania.
The researchers fitted out each of these hives with a customised entrance featuring an automated imaging system. The system digitally tracked the times the QR-fitted bee left and returned to the hive, even in low-resolution conditions.
Margarita López-Uribe, associate professor...