Boffins tail bees with tiny radio tags Bees with radio tags glued onto their backs have been busily demonstrating just how long it takes them to get home, and how much easier it is to travel west. The tags are 13.75MHz RFID tags – very small ones – and were glued to individual bees by researchers Mario Pahl and ShaoWu Zhang. Once properly tagged, the bees were …
... that's a job for the intern, surely?
"Right what we want you to do is pick out the bees one by one and glue these mini tags on. Now naturally you cant use gloves for that as they're too small, so well... you'll get the hang of it. We'll be back in a few days to check how your going..."
That bee also has her pollen baskets full (look on the back legs, the blue balls are pollen) so she has the RFID and a pollen load to carry.
It's interesting, as bees seem to pick up landmarks as they return, not on the outward journey. Moving a hive within about three miles of its old position tends to mean bees returning to the old site - they pick up old clues and head to the old home. Typically they fly in about a two mile radius, hence the three mile rule should remove a lot of overlap. if they are looking at the distant horizon for visual clues we may be losing more than we thought back to the old site.
Some are better than others, and I would guess that one had been caught after she'd collected that pollen. If you sit and watch them come back some barely have any, others look as if they've been dropped in Barbara Cartland's mascara, and some have baskets of pollen almost as big as themselves.
I'm not having a go about animal cruelty or anything (foraging bees are at the end of their lives anyway, not that such a thing makes any difference) it was more an observation that the bees are not just carrying an RFID.
I think (I am not a bee researcher, but I do keep them and have read a lot of books. Most of which contradict each other) they use more visual clues than just far off mountains, including the sun.They do have polarised light sensitivity, so they can see where the sun is through dense cloud, so I would guess that landmarks are part of an arsenal of navigational aids.
Mine are also really fickle about going out. Too cold, too damp, too windy, too rainy and they stay indoors. Perhaps fog is just another one on the list of types of weather to avoid.
I've just completed a bee keeping course, who knew it would actually bee useful (see what I did there?)
Optimal flight temperate is low to mid 20s C, and they don't tend to fly at all at temperatures much below 10 C, fog forms in air cooler than that so I guess the bees aren't out in those conditions anyway.
Be careful about believing everything they tell you on the course.
Get a hive full of Fen Bastards (the affectionate name for the local wild black beasts we have out in six-toe territory) and they'll fly at ridiculously low temperatures. A bright frosty day has mine out and not just for a poo, they came back with snowdrop pollen on their legs whilst the snow isn't even melting on the ground.
Admittedly, I've never seen them trying it in fog. Maybe it's time for a pissing contest "My bees will fly at lower temperatures than yours" etc. :)
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