How researchers use technology to track bees

AccuWeather speaks with Robyn Underwood of Penn State about how they track bees' foraging behavior by using tiny QR codes.

Transcript

00:00So many questions, so many questions while researchers are trying to find answers in a unique way using tiny

00:08QR codes, I'm not making that up here to explain is Robin Underwood

00:12She's an extension educator in apiculture or beekeeping at Penn State's College of

00:18Agricultural Sciences what a title. I hope you enjoyed our bee puns

00:23I'm sure you have many more to go around Robin

00:25And how did this idea start to combine QR codes and bees to track their foraging behavior?

00:33We've been doing research on organic

00:36honey bee colony management hoping to get nice clean products and

00:41We wanted to learn about how far they were going from the hive and it's really hard to watch the bees

00:48They move really fast, and they're very small so we employed

00:51Engineering and hardware and software to

00:55Do the monitoring for us, and we can get lots of information this way now

01:00I gotta ask how do you attach the QR codes?

01:03I'm sure you do it carefully and how many bees have them on and does it impede their flight in any way?

01:11The QR codes are a

01:132.6 millimeter circle just enough to be on their back and not interfere with their wings and

01:18We attach it with a little bit of glue made from shellac

01:23And we did about a hundred bees per colony every two weeks

01:29throughout the entire season so

01:3232,000 bees were marked in 2024 Wow so what are you learning, and what are some of the most surprising findings?

01:41Really it was a lot of troubleshooting with engineers to get this hardware up and running

01:46It's remote so we had to use solar energy to keep the batteries charged, and that was a really big challenge

01:53And we've only looked at a little bit of data so far

01:57But it looks like bees are only gone from the hive most of the time up to four minutes

02:01So they're very efficient going out to flowers filling up and returning to the hive

02:06lots more data analysis to come

02:09And how will this research help our knowledge of bees and help their sustainability in the future?

02:17It's important to know how far they're flying so we can look into the landscape when we're putting our hives at various places on farms

02:24and things to think about

02:26What plants are going to be able to access and what?

02:30Potential pesticides they could be also accessing so finding the cleanest best spots for our bees is really the goal

02:38Amazing Robin Underwood with Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences

02:42Thank you so much for joining us on AccuWeather Early this morning